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Older post:Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Salmon and Potatoes
Layers of sliced potatoes, onion, and salmon baked with egg, cream and fresh dill make a memorable meal. Serve with a green salad.
This is a classic Swedish recipe, invented to use up leftover salmon. I don’t think we suffer from this problem, but in fact you can use any sort of salmon you like—uncooked fresh salmon, leftover cooked salmon, smoked salmon, probably even tinned salmon—or a mixture. You can think of this as a Swedish lasagne, with potatoes instead of pasta.
Laxpudding (Salmon and Potato Pudding)
Serves 4-6.
Ingredients
For the Pudding
1kg potatoes
2 onion, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon butter
450g salmon, cut into bite-sized pieces (you can use a mixture of different types of salmon).
50g fresh dill, finely chopped
3 eggs
300ml milk
120ml double or whipping cream
½ tsp salt
freshly ground pepper, to taste (if you have white pepper here is a good opportunity to use it).
Decorations for the Top
100g butter (optional)
additional sprigs of fresh dill
thin slices of lemon
Preparation
Put the potatoes in cold water and bring slowly to the boil. Simmer gently until they are just tender. Drain. When they are cool enough to handle peel them (unless you like the peel), and slice them thin. Set aside while you prepare the other ingredients.
Heat the oven to 200C and butter an ovenproof dish. Something on the order of 25cm x 35cm is about right but there’s no need to be precise.
Sauté the onion in the butter until it softens, without browning. Set aside.
Mix the salmon with the dill and set aside as well.
Whisk the eggs, milk, cream, salt and pepper together.
Now assemble the pudding: put a third of the potatoes at the bottom of the pan. Spread half the onions over the potatoes, and top these with half the salmon and dill. Make another potato layer. Top this with the remaining onions, and then the remaining salmon and dill. Finish with a final layer of potatoes.
Pour the eggy mixture over the salmon pudding.
Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until the pudding feels firm and the crust is nicely browned.
To serve, first decide if you wish to use the additional butter drizzle. If you do—and it’s traditional—melt the butter in a small pan until it starts to turn a hazelnut brown colour and smells nutty and tempting. Pour this over the baked pudding. Garnish artfully with sprigs of dill and slices of lemon. Serve cut into squares.
(Recipe courtesy of Ulrika Andersson, Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies, Uppsala.)