Hot smoked salmon is probably one of my favourite things to eat. It’s rich, full of flavour, filling, and looks beautiful too – coral pink on the outside, soft pink inside. Adding some to a salad provides substance and flavour (I exchange it for tuna for a kind of nicoise salad). Mixing with mashed potato makes tasty fishcakes. Stirring into pasta with some cream cheese provides you with an instant pasta dish.
I actually found a new hot smoked salmon recipe in Marcus Wareing’s recent book: eggs Benedict with the salmon replacing the ham. So I trotted down to my local fishmonger to buy some of his hot smoked salmon (which is the best I have ever tasted), and couldn’t resist buying an extra couple of fillets for a more immediate meal. But then I didn’t really fancy pasta, and fishcakes seemed to be a bit of hassle, so I decided to make kedgeree.
Traditionally a breakfast dish, I think kedgeree makes a light and interesting evening meal too, and it’s very easy to make. I bulked mine out with some kale and peas as I didn’t have any parsley in the house, so my meal was packed full of healthy ingredients too.
Healthy, nutritious and packed full of flavour - hot smoked salmon kedgeree, with kale and peas Click To TweetHot smoked salmon kedgeree – serves 4
- 2 hot smoked salmon fillets, 1.5 cups basmati rice, 1tbsp vegetable oil, 1 chopped onion, 2tsp mild curry powder, 2 eggs, large handful of kale, 1 cup peas
Kedgeree is a marriage of different prepared ingredients, so you need to sort out a few separate things before you can assemble the dish. This is the way I prepared my kedgeree, to minimise on washing up (2 saucepans, a colander, a wooden spoon).
Firstly put the rice on to cook: Use the instructions on the packet of rice, or do as I did, which is measure out 1.5 cups of rice and double the amount of water and put both in a pan. Bring the pan to the boil and simmer with the lid on for 10 minutes until the water has evaporated and the rice is tender. Drain into a colander to ensure there is no water left, and then use the same saucepan to sautée your chopped onion in the vegetable oil.
Once the onion has softened (after a couple of minutes), add the curry powder and coat the onion. Do this for just one minute so that the spices cook out in the heat. At this point you could also add chopped garlic, but I forgot to do so, and my dish didn’t suffer from the lack of it.
Add the rice back to the pan and stir it in so the rice is coated with the curried onion. Stir in some frozen peas, which will defrost when you set the pan aside and get on with the next part of the dish.
Boil the eggs: my failsafe way of boiling eggs is to put then in a pan of cold water (pinch of salt added, which I heard stops the shell from cracking but that could be an old wives tale) and bring up to the boil. As soon as the water starts to bubble, turn the egg timer (I have an hourglass one with sand that trickles through to time the egg). When the sand goes through the timer once, you will have perfect soft boiled eggs (runny yolks, hard whites). Turn the timer over and allow the sand to run through a second time, and at the end of that cycle you will have a perfect hard boiled egg (that is hard white and a soft but solid yolk). You need the hard boiled eggs for kedgeree, although personally I wouldn’t mind soft boiled ones, or even poached eggs, so that the yolk dribbles over the rice. Drain immediately and plunge into cold water to stop the cooking process. I gently smash the shells so that the egg cools more quickly. I find it’s easier to peel the eggs as soon as they are cool enough to handle, and then you can just pop the eggs back into the cold water until you are ready to slice them and pop them on top of the kedgeree.
Use the egg pan now to cook your kale in salted water. Because kale can be a bit tough, I cooked the kale for 5 minutes so that the stalks were tender too. Drain in a colander.
Okay, so now you are ready to assemble the dish, which is simply a case of stirring the kale into the rice (which will still be warm), flaking in the fish, and topping with quartered eggs. Hey presto, job done! You can of course add salt and pepper if you wish, but personally I find that the smoked fish adds enough seasoning to the kedgeree (especially if this is a dish for little ones as well).
I took a portion of the kedgeree out of the pan before I added the kale so that Ioan could have it (he’s a bit fussy with textures and tends to pick tougher vegetables out of his meals), and he wolfed it down, so it was definitely a success!
As I told my mum, having a light dish like this leaves you with more room for pudding.
I’ll be making the hot smoked salmon eggs Benedict tomorrow for a Cookbook Challenge, so stay tuned for more!
Sounds wonderful, I love hot smoked salmon!
Great recipe! My kids will only eat salmon if it’s smoked, so I’ve been looking for home smoking recipes. I had a nice cut of fish from Lummi (they’re great) and whipped this up a couple days ago. They loved it!