This is a great recipe I like to do and freeze. This gives me a fast and tasty lunch or dinner when I am in a hurry or well, I am just too lazy to do some cooking 😉You need :
- 2 cup of potatoes
- 4 cloves of garlic peeled
- 65gr butter
- 1 cup minced leek
- 500-600g salmon chopped in cube
- 80ml cream 35% (heavy)
- 2 pie of pate brisee ( recipe here )
- Optional cheese
Bechamel
- ½ minced onion or shallot
- 300ml milk
- 56g room temp butter
- 4tbps flour
- Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
- oil
Instructions
- Let’s start with the potatoes, fill a pot with water, add the potato and garlic, bring to a boil. Add a good tablespoon of salt and let the potatoes cook for 15 minutes. Drain, dump half the butter in the potatoes, and put the cover back on for 2 minutes ( this let the butter melt all over ). Remove cover and mash, add salt and pepper to taste. It’s normal they are a bit “dry”.
- Now let’s attack the filling. In a pan over medium heat, put the remaining butter and the leeks and let them cook a little bit until they are soft, you don’t want them to brown. Dump the salmon and the cream in the pan and mix every once in a while. You want to cook the salmon but not too much, it will cook in the oven later, you want every side to be light pink and not raw. At this point, most of the cream should be gone. If the fish is not cooked, add a bit more cream.
- Put the salmon mix in your mashed potatoes and mix gently ( you don’t want to break your salmon into tiny pieces ). Do a taste test adjust with salt and pepper. You can add cheese here, about a 1/4 cup; I usually don’t as this recipe is already pretty rich.
- For the bechamel, you need to make a beurre manié. To do so you simply mix flour with butter on a 1:1 ratio. Put that in a bowl and mash it with a fork, it will make a paste. Note that you should not need all of it, I always make a 1/4 more in case I need to adjust.
- Heat a pan over medium heat and soften the onion with a bit of oil for a couple of minutes. Add the milk and stir. Note that you don’t want to boil the milk here. After a few minutes add half you beurre manié and whisk. You want a thick consistency. If it’s too watery still add more beurre manié. Tip if you want to know when ready, using a spoon or whatever you have, if you dip if and run your finger on it and you can still see if a few seconds after, it’s ready. Remove from heat and reserve. Remember to give it a stir every couple of minutes just so it doesn’t solidify
- Pre-heat oven at 400F. If you have followed my instruction in the pate brisee recipe, you should now have 2 disks of dough.
- Take some butter and grease your pie pan bottom and side, don’t put too much. Add a little bit of flour and using a circular motion cover all the butter with flour, remove any excess flour.
- Put your bottom layer in the pie pan and fill with your salmon/potatoes mix. Once it’s somewhat leveled, add the bechamel all over. Using a bit of milk, lightly brush the dough circumference ( this will help to bind the 2 doughs). Put the top dough disk on and using a fork press down both doughs together ( don’t press too hard here but you want some nice design ). Remove excess dough by using the back of a chef knife and just going around the side of the pie pan. Make at least 1 hole in the top dough so heat can escape. I usually do a 1″ square right in the center.
- Using the brush we used earlier, lightly brush the top dough with milk.  Cook for 45 minutes
So why use milk and not egg? You can! The main difference here is milk will not give a sheen, eggs will. Only a question of look
When cooled, cut into pieces, wrap in plastic film and let them have a nap in your freezer! 20 minutes at 375F will bring it back to life