A Deep Dive Into Dishwasher Salmon, The Grossest Dish I’ve Seen All Year

Today in news that has me ready to log off for the year and throw myself into the ocean — people are cooking salmon in their dishwasher.

Cooking food in a dishwasher, albeit disgusting, is not a new thing. We’ve seen it before with the infamous dishwasher lasagne that went viral after an episode of Extreme Cheapskates on TLC, but now we’ve upped the ante with dishwasher salmon.

Please excuse me while I gag.

This monstrous creation, which honestly looks like a surefire way to give your whole family food poisoning on Christmas Day, came to my attention thanks to AAP journalist Gina Rushton, who I will now be billing for the therapy needed to forget about this.

I begin every fact-check shift wading through misrepresented studies, strange health claims, baseless legal theories and flat earth pics and then something I think is too disturbing to be genuine will prove true pic.twitter.com/Za9XXKuUXT

— Gina Rushton (@ginarush) December 19, 2021

For reasons unclear to me, some people possess the urge to walk into their kitchen — which presumably has an oven and a stove, especially if you’re fancy enough to own a dishwasher — pull out a piece of fresh salmon and throw that bad boy in the same cleaning appliance they use to wash dirty plates.

But according to NPR, the end result is a “tender, moist and super flavourful” poached salmon that was — and I quote — “better than her fish cooked in the oven”.

So, on account of the fact that it is a slow news day in the last working week of the year, I have taken it upon myself to deep dive into the history of dishwasher cooking — specifically, salmon.

Dishwasher Salmon, An Origin Story

The delicacy of the dishwasher salmon is almost as old as the dishwasher itself, which first appeared in the 1950s but didn’t become a household staple until the ’70s. Funnily enough, this was the same decade in which Vincent Price gave us the dish we’re still gagging over 46 years later.

On a 1975 episode of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, actor Vincent Price — of The Fly and The Great Mouse Detective fame — made history by cooking dishwasher fish. If we want to get technical, he made dishwasher trout, but the method to the madness remains much the same.

While this seems like a stunt from the actor, Price was also a pretty popular cook at the time, authoring multiple cookbooks and even hosting his own cooking show for a hot second. And the dishwasher fish was — and continues to be — a very real thing.

“[The dishwasher] steams, and it heats… You couldn’t do meat or anything like that,” he told Johnny Carson at the time. “But fish cooks in only a very short time. And it really is kind of beautiful!”

The jury is still out on whether or not Price invented dishwasher cooking, but he sure as hell popularised it.

While we mostly hear about dishwasher cooking as a disgusting, viral trend, it was once a wealth flex — the Supreme sneakers of the 1970s, if you will.

Considering dishwashers were so new, and subsequently pricey, cooking your guests fish served fresh out of the dishwasher proved that you were wealthy enough to afford one.

Nearly half a century later, dishwasher cooking is mostly reserved for TikTok trends and BuzzFeed Tasty videos. But as it turns out, it’s actually a safe way to cook food, if you happen to end up in a situation where all of your other kitchen appliances simultaneously stop working.

If you’re really keen to cook dishwasher salmon for your family (assuming you hate them, I guess), you can find a recipe here.