Earlier this week, I wrote about Australian food abominations, including the cat food-meets-cat sick monstrosity that is tuna mornay. But if you swap out tinned tuna for tinned pink salmon and give it a fish pie vibe, you have an altogether different dish. One of Mum’s dinnertime staples is salmon shortcake – I had an urge to make it the other day so I got her to email me the recipe from Australia. Naturally, I cannot leave a recipe alone so I took Mum’s recipe, added creme fraiche, sweet paprika, dill and leftover gammon to create salmon and gammon shortcake.
I promise I didn’t go with this recipe just because it has an amusing rhyming name. I had leftover gammon from last weekend’s roast so I chopped it into little pieces and popped it into two freezer bags for later use. When I realised the gammon chunks would work well with the salmon, a new dish was born. If you haven’t got any cooked gammon on hand (I realise that is a bit of a niche ingredient…), diced bacon would work just as well.
This made enough for dinner for two and we’ll polish off the rest for lunch tomorrow.
Salmon and gammon shortcake
Ingredients
2 tablespoons salted butter (unsalted works fine too – I am just a salt fiend…)
1 onion, diced
1 bunch spring onions, finely sliced (the bunch of about 6-8 spring onions from the supermarket)
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3/4 cup milk
200g creme fraiche
2 tablespoons plain flour
200g tin pink salmon
200g chopped cooked gammon or diced bacon
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Salt, sweet paprika and dill to taste
For the shortcake topping
1 cup self-raising flour
1 tablespoon butter
100g grated cheese
1/2 cup milk
Instructions
- Grease a shallow baking dish or pie dish. Set aside.
- Melt the butter and cook the onion, spring onion and garlic over a high heat until the onion starts to soften.
- Turn the heat down to low and add the milk, creme fraiche and flour. Stir through until you have a creamy, smooth sauce.
- Turn off the heat and season with salt, sweet paprika and dill, then stir through the lemon juice.
- Add the salmon and gammon. Over a low heat, break up the salmon with a fork and combine everything well.
- Pour the salmon and gammon mixture into the greased dish. Set aside.
- Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.
- For the shortcake topping, put the flour into a bowl, make a well and add the butter and milk. Mix well with a table knife or a dough hook on a hand mixer.
- Add the cheese to the dough and turn out onto a board. Using your hands, squish the dough out until it’s about 0.5cm thick.
- Cut the dough into shapes – Mum likes to cut it into triangles but I used a heart-shaped biscuit cutter – and place the shapes on top of the salmon and gammon mix.
- Bake for 20 minutes or until the topping is puffy and golden-brown.