Smoked Salmon Pasta

I love the flavors in this recipe. Homemade, whole wheat pasta, smoked salmon, tarragon, parsley, and lots of sweet butter.

This is a dish for the Pacific Northwest, for Salmon Nation. Big flavors, hearty, unpretentious. No tweezers, fancy plating or hard-to-find ingredients here.

I make my own smoked salmon and my own whole wheat pasta, the latter from wheat I grow in my own backyard. (I admit I am a little crazy.) This recipe will be better with homemade salmon and pasta, but store-bought will do. Note that I use hot-smoked salmon, which flakes, not cold-smoked, which will not.

I chose whole wheat pasta, actually bigoli, which I made with an old school Italian torchio, because it has heft, and the homemade spaghetti is rougher in texture than machine made; this roughness allows each strand of pasta to hold onto more sauce. I urge you to use whole wheat, spelt or some other heartier, darker pasta here. It matters.

As for the salmon, in this case I used a chum salmon I smoked over alder and glazed with birch syrup. Chum (a/k/a keta or dog salmon) are excellent candidates for smoking, but any species will do. As would any kind of trout. Smoked lake trout would be ideal. New Englanders should use smoked mackerel or bluefish, Southerners smoked king mackerel or wahoo.

The rest is pretty simple. and this recipe comes together in less than 30 minutes if you have everything ready.

5 from 2 votes

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Smoked Salmon Pasta

Prep Time

10 mins

Cook Time

20 mins

Total Time

30 mins

 

To really appreciate this recipe you should use whole wheat, spelt or other darker pasta, not standard semolina - but if that's all you can find, don't let it stop you from making this recipe. I prefer smoked salmon here, but any smoked fish will work, such as trout, mackerel or bluefish. 

Course: Pasta

Cuisine: American

Serves: 4 people

Author: Hank Shaw

Ingredients

• 1 pound whole wheat pasta
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter
• 1 large shallot, minced
• 1/2 pound smoked salmon, flaked
• 1/4 cup white wine or vermouth
• 2 tablespoons chopped tarragon
• 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
• Black pepper

Instructions

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add enough salt to make the water taste quite salty, like seawater. Add the pasta.

2. In a large saute or frying pan, heat the butter over medium heat and add the shallot. Saute the shallot, stirring often. You want it soft but not browned. Add the flaked salmon and spread it in one layer in the pan. Let this cook to sear a bit. Don't move the fish for at least a minute, maybe two.

3. Pour in the wine and use a metal spatula to scrape up everything off the bottom of the pan. When most of the wine has boiled away, mix in the herbs and add fair bit of black pepper, maybe a couple teaspoons' worth; you want to taste black pepper in this dish. Turn the heat to low. 

4. To finish, move the pasta from the boiling water to the pan, and toss. I like to add maybe 1/4 cup of pasta cooking water to the mix to emulsify everything. Toss and serve at once. 

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