Salmon Pie Experiment 2: Phyllo's Revenge
(contains grass)
One dinner I made recently was yet another Salmon Pie Experiment, coming in on the creative haunches of Salmon Pie Experiment 1: A Surprising Success. I just googled “coming in on the haunches” because I wasn’t sure 1) if that’s an actual expression and 2) if I used it properly - I think the answers are no and no, but I like it anyway! Creative Haunches would be the name of my indie publishing company.
If you consider my use of “recently” relative to the lifespan of the universe, it was indeed extremely recent. But by all other accounts this was about a month ago, aka not that recent. Okay here’s a picture.
I would say that I don’t know why I keep playing around with the idea of salmon pie, but I do know why - it was really spankin delicious the first time, and also people always get wide-eyed and excited at the mention of savory pie. Pie’s slogan should be: “I do know why: it’s Pie!”
I made this for John’s aunt (Barb), cousin (Laura), and cousin-in-law (Pedro) (and John too I guess) while we were staying with Barb in her home in the great state of Vermont. Special shout out to Barb who is the newest paid subscriber of Laura’s Dinner, who also gifted us a gourgeoisie begonia in one of her own ceramic pots since she is a master ceramicist of incredible skill. We named the begonia Barbgonia and she’s an icon and we love her.
I thought it would be fun to make a big casserole-style pie and that phyllo would be easier to manipulate than puff pastry, and also that it would all be a perfect opportunity to once again make something I’ve never made before without bothering to examine a single iota of helpful information on the internet or otherwise - only this time for more people!
Laura is pregnant and said she couldn’t stomach white rice of any kind, but wild rice was okay! At first the request threw me off a little bit, because the purpose of the rice in v1 was to absorb any excess liquid in the greens mixture (as I’m sure you’ll all acutely recall) and I feel like wild rice is less absorbent. But is that true? Isn’t it amazing how we can teach ourselves things? Like, the very person who has no idea if wild rice is less absorbent than white rice is actually the same person who will be responsible for figuring it out and explaining it to herself.
I can’t just say things willy nilly around here without fact checking, so I once again turned to my favorite website, google.com, and found that not only was my intuition correct, but also holy shit, wild rice isn’t even rice! It’s grass!
So I boiled my wild grass to near doneness, and once again mixed it with some spinach, watercress, onions, dill, parsley, garlic, and onions that I had sautéed all together, along with a squeeze of lemon, some olive oil and s+p. Once that mixture cooled a bit I crumbled in a bunch of feta, and layered half of it in my 9x13 baking dish that I had lined with a bunch of layers of phyllo dough.
I’m not known for being a delicate person, but even still I think it’s universally challenging to handle phyllo without it tearing - luckily the more tears makes it look more rustico. I did brush the layers with olive oil and half-assedly seasoned them with salt and pepper here and there.
I cubed up a nice filet of salmon, seasoned that with salt and pepper too, and then added the other half of my greens mixture on top (not pictured) before closing it all up with a flourish.
I guess I could have just constructed the top with flat layers if I wanted to be sensible and have it cook evenly, but why spend 3 minutes using your brain to think about a desirable outcome when you can just proceed mindlessly and hope that good intentions are enough?
I think I saw this scrunching technique used in a custard pie or something that probably baked for like 40+ minutes, enough to get everything really evenly browned. This salmon pie only spent about 20 minutes in a 400ºF oven since, once again, I was worried about the salmon overcooking before the pastry was done. One month later, I am now currently reading about this much better technique that would have produced a less shocking contrast between the pale phyllo and the well done phyllo. Here’s the finished thing again so you can look down on me and wonder how I’m even a food stylist in the first place.
The good news is that it was done as heck around the sides and bottom - nice and crisp and golden brown, the salmon wasn’t dry, the greens weren’t soggy, and everyone was happy. Barb even went in for seconds!
I don’t remember what dessert was that night, but if we had dessert it would have been our second dessert of the day, seeing as we had creemees every single day of the entire week we spent in Vermont. If you don’t know what a creemee is, here are 6 examples and some thumbs.
A few weeks ago some tooth pain that I had been ignoring for months came back. Who would ever guess that would happen! I went to the dentist for the first time in 12,000 years, and upon taking the very first x-ray the technician goes “oh damn that’s your wisdom tooth, baby” which apparently means “we will be removing your wisdom tooth promptly” because that’s what ended up happening. Apparently it had a massive crack in it??? Top left, aka tooth #1.
So the next day I got her yanked out by a young dentist 1 year out of dental school. I could feel her struggling a bit at one point, and almost on cue the more experienced dentist at the office (who looked like Wayne Brady) strolls past my room (the door was open for some reason??), nods his head, swoops in and pulls it out Chris Hemsworth style, easy peasy.
Once they were done, I asked about keeping my tooth maybe 4 times because I was worried they might forget I wanted her, and instead throw her away or something (is that what they do?). But they didn’t forget! After a brief soak in formaldehyde (ew?????), she’s disgusting and she’s all mine! I named her Peach since peaches have cracks (kinda) too.
Literally everyone in my life is grossed out and mystified as to why I kept her, except John of course, who made the suggestion in the first place. Sound off in the comments which side you’re on: enemy or soulmate.
Hi Laura, you inspired me to make this fish pie. It turned out beautifully! Thank you!
Enemy