Tracing a magnificent (and tasty) king salmon to its Alaska origins

There was a big fillet of king salmon on my cutting board, a shimmering, deep orange, magnificent in its heft. It resembled the farmed salmon you see at the supermarket all year in the same way a perfect, just-picked peach from the orchard resembles the one in syrup you're served on an airplane. It glistened with hard-earned fat, a product of thousands of miles of migration and eating, from birth in the snow-fed headwaters of Alaska rivers to a life lived in the sea beneath.

Wild salmon takes its bright color and derives its rich flavor from the forage it hunts on its journey away from and back to home, not from the pellets a farmer selects for hue and feeds the fish as they swim lazily in a pen.

I pan-roasted mine in foaming butter backed up by the instant zip and high heat of jalapeño peppers. When I had consumed it in a rush of pleasure, I got to thinking about where such salmon come from, who catches them and how they make their way across the United States.

The questions led to phone calls and discussions about fish farming and sustainability — wild-caught Alaskan salmon, harvested each year from late spring until fall, is rated a Best Choice by the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program — and eventually to Tele Aadsen and her husband, Joel Brady-Power, commercial fishermen out of Bellingham, Washington. (Aadsen uses ''fisherman'' for herself as well.) Each summer the couple steam north to Sitka, aboard their 43-foot boat, the Nerka, to troll for salmon along the Southeast Alaska coast. It takes four days if the tides are right, the weather holds, the engine does what it's supposed to do. They have made the passage each June for as long as either can remember. Brady-Power's parents built the Nerka in 1979 as a salmon troller and brought him aboard when he was an infant. He took over the boat 12 years ago, when he was 22. Aadsen, 39, is a child of Sitka whose parents were also commercial fishermen. She joined Brady-Power aboard the Nerka in 2006.

There are five varieties of wild salmon in Alaska: king, coho, sockeye, pink and chum. Aadsen and Brady-Power chase two of them. At the start of July, the couple take the Nerka from Sitka to the Fairweather Grounds, well offshore of Glacier Bay National Park, for the opening of the king salmon season. When it closes, they turn to coho, or silvers, and fish until the fall, working under quotas that help ensure that enough salmon can get into their home rivers to spawn and keep the fishery alive. They work along 500 miles of coast. It is a big office.

The Nerka — Brady-Power's parents named the boat after the scientific name of the sockeye they harvested, Oncorhynchus nerka — is a trolling operation. Aadsen and Brady-Power run four lines behind their boat, each with spreads of lures attached to them. If the fish are where they were yesterday, they'll reel those lines in heavy and throbbing and carefully gaff the fish from the hooks. Aadsen thanks each animal as it comes aboard before she slices its gills to bleed the fish before she cleans it and places it in the hold below the Nerka's deck.

And if the fish are not there?

''It's the eternal question,'' Aadsen told me just before she pushed off from Bellingham in late June. ''Stick and stay and make it pay? Or run because maybe it's better somewhere else?'' Either way, the days are long under the high summer sun.

To store their fish, Aadsen and Brady-Power must put their catch in a blast freezer that lowers the core temperature of the salmon to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The fish freeze through before their cells begin to break down, remaining ''fresh'' for as long as they are deep-frozen, and allowing the Nerka to stay at sea for weeks at a time.

To protect the salmon from freezer burn, Aadsen must descend into the freezer itself, clad in face mask, beanie and jumpsuit, long johns, fleece pants, thermal shirt and sweatshirt beneath it, two layers of socks, military-grade Arctic boots and long, insulated rubber gloves. She dips each fish into a slurry of ice water to create a thick glaze across its iridescent skin. A king salmon could approach 3 feet in length and weigh more than 30 pounds. Aadsen is 5 foot 2. She dips each fish twice, her eyelashes frozen and sweat running down her back.

When they fill their hold, Aadsen and Brady-Power return to Sitka, where their frozen cargo is loaded into totes that are sent on barges to Seattle and driven to a cold-storage facility near Bellingham. Come fall, Aadsen will go to that warehouse every week to fill her Prius with salmon and sell it to restaurants or ship it to customers across the United States.

Wild salmon is not inexpensive, as farmed salmon can be. But it can be hard — after talking to Aadsen, checking in on her season, hearing about gear problems or storm fronts or a long run offshore only to find a school of fish has disappeared — not to think it should come at a premium, that it should be treated as well in the kitchen as Aadsen does on the Nerka. That hot butter splashes on the ruddy, lustrous flesh, searing it tight, amplifying a deep richness that is countered by jalapeño, and it becomes something incredible: a taste of one of our last truly wild foods.

Sam Sifton is the food editor of The New York Times, the founding editor of NYT Cooking and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine.