We recently had a conversation with a friend about meat loafs. Not just your standard meatloaf made with hamburger meat, but any meat that you can turn into a loaf. For example…meatballs, crabcakes, turkey burgers. They’re all basically the same, right? Some type of ground meat, bread, spices, maybe some egg to hold it all together. But how come you never see chicken burgers made with ground chicken? Why is it always the lowly chicken breast? And you never see Chicken Loaf? What’s up with that??!
Moving on…we recently received this cookbook for Christmas from America’s Test Kitchen. Brace yourselves…you’ll be seeing a lot more of this book on this blog! We also recently purchased this book from Cook’s Illustrated. Have we gone mad??!
So the first recipe we decided to try was Southwestern Salmon Cakes. I am pretty sure this is the same thing as “salmon croquettes,” which sounds fancier. However, I think most salmon croquettes are made from canned salmon. My mom tried to get me to eat canned salmon once when I was a kid. It was the only time in my life I refused to eat something she made for dinner. Something about it was just really unappealing.
THIS, however, is completely different. We start out with fresh salmon and cut it up into little pieces. Seems like a lot of trouble, right? Well…it was. But I think it was worth it. Next time, however, I will ask the butcher to remove the skin from the bottom. THAT was a big pain as well.
Ingredients include: cilantro, scallions, panko breadcrumbs, mayo, sour cream, green chilies, and lime juice. The green chilies are what make this recipe “southwestern.”
The “sauce” is a mixture of mayo, sour cream, lime, and cilantro. We also added sriracha for kicks.
In a separate bowl goes the cut up salmon, chilies, scallions, panko, and 3 tablespoons of the mayo mixture. That orange squirt gun, by the way, is to keep the cat off the counter. In case you were wondering. Normally we would try to avoid having extraneous objects in our photos, but we failed this time.
All nice and mixed up.
It was a little tricky to get them in patty form, but they held up well enough.
Next, they get an extra coating of panko so that the outside is nice and crispy. Panko bread crumbs, if you're not familiar, are the embodiment of crunch.
Into the fryer!
Crispy and flavorful. It doesn’t have a fishy taste like you would expect, and the chilies were a nice addition. We bought the “hot” hatch chilies, but they didn’t live up to the name. Maybe next time we’ll add some cayenne or something to the mixture. We like to keep things spicy here at Chez Venza!
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