•A novel approach to constructing polynomial minimal surfaces is presented.•Minimal surfaces arise from Pythagorean triples of complex polynomials.•They are Pythagorean-normal surfaces with isothermal parameterization.•Generalization to minimal surfaces in non-isothermal parameterization is given.•Cubic, quartic and quintic examples are presented and visualized. A novel approach to constructing polynomial minimal surfaces (surfaces of zero mean curvature) with isothermal parameterization from Pythagorean triples of complex polynomials is presented, and it is shown that they are Pythagorean normal (PN) surfaces, i.e., their unit normal vectors have a rational dependence on the surface parameters. This construction generalizes a prior approach based on Pythagorean triples of real polynomials, and yields more free shape parameters for surfaces of a specified degree. Moreover, when one of the complex polynomials is just a constant, the minimal surfaces have the Pythagorean–hodograph (PH) preserving property — a planar PH curve in the parameter domain is mapped to a spatial PH curve on the surface. Cubic, quartic and quintic examples of these minimal PN surfaces are presented, including examples of solutions to the Plateau problem, with boundaries generated by planar PH curve segments in the parameter domain. The construction is also generalized to the case of minimal surfaces with non–isothermal parameterizations. Finally, an application to the problem of interpolating three given points in R3 as the corners of a triangular cubic minimal surface patch, such that the three patch sides have prescribed lengths, is addressed.