This was the product of running into some extremely cheap salmon at the grocery store because it had been sitting defrosted for a while and was getting weird. I will complain about how this should not happen another time. Briefly, all the fish in the grocery store arrives pre-cut and frozen! Just sell it like that! Goddamn! Anyway I had cheap salmon and while it would probably have held up fine to simple baking, I figured I’d try something more old-fashioned like a pie.

I glanced over a couple recipes and then winged this one. Consistent themes are poaching the salmon (if you’re not using canned salmon, an option), and a generally pretty light spice treatment based on herbs and pepper.

You want ~twice as much raw potato as salmon here, I think. I don’t typically peel potatoes for mash but you can if you want. An egg-wash on the pastry gives it a nice colour, and you can avoid wasting the leftover egg by putting some of it into the mash, which is a trick that I use in cottage pie as well to give the mash a fluffier, firmer texture.

Herbs here can go wild, I do dill or marjoram but you can go pretty wild. I do go very heavy on the pepper here. I don’t add any milk to the potatoes, I think you get enough liquid from the poaching liquid and if you want to add more liquid, consider just using the water you boiled the potatoes in.

A nice addition to the mash would be some kind of green onion and some kind of garlic, yet more tricks from my go-to cottage pie recipe.

I almost always use store-bought puff pastry for pies. The filling here is robust enough that you aren’t going to get a ton of stuff leaking out through small holes so you can patch up the crumbliness of generic grocery store pastry. Homemade stuff has real butter but I go pretty heavy on the butter in the onions step, swings and roundabouts.

I recommend using a spring-form tin for fully sealed pies like this, it’s very convenient to be able to just pop that stuff out. I have photos of this one! but I’m still figuring out automatic image rescaling in Pelican with asciidoc but for now just check this tumblr post.