Salmon Pesto Pasta

So salmon pesto pasta is my attempt at cooking something simple that’s a little bit different than my other go-to recipes (which all involve rice and are traditional Japanese-style recipes). I make it with cherry tomatoes and broccoli. It’s fairly simple, but it’s taken multiple attempts to get to something I think actually tastes good.

The two things that tripped me up are:

1. Finding the right salmon

Any supermarket in Japan stocks salmon, but what I failed to realise is that it is usually this variety of chum salmon known as 鮭 or “shake”. This has bones in it and is usually used in more traditional Japanese dishes, where it’s cooked as-is and you use your chopsticks to pick out the bones. What I was more familiar with (growing up in Australia) was Atlantic salmon, where you get a big chunk of boneless meat which you can roast in your oven. So I was super confused the first time I made this and then had to pick the bones out of everything.

One of the supermarkets near me stocks “salmon trout” or サーモントラウト - which confusingly in English is actually known as a Rainbow trout, so it’s not even salmon at all. But this is more what I was expecting when I was imagining salmon.

2. The sauce

You need to make sure you get a nice tub of Pesto sauce. Basil sauce is not the same thing. This is dependent on what your local supermarket stocks.

Ingredients

Makes 2 servings

The veg

• A large pack of cherry tomatoes
• 1 head of broccoli

Protein

• 200g of salmon trout (サーモントラウト) or other salmon variety that is not “shake” (鮭)

Pasta

• Whatever variety you feel like, I do 200g for 2 people.

Sauce

• 50g pesto sauce (I found a store that sells the Barilla brand)
• Butter (10g)
• 1 Tbspn milk
• 1/2 tpsn lemon juice
• 2 - 3 Tbsp pasta water (or you can skip this depending on how much juices have leaked out of the cherry tomatoes).

Misc

• 1 Tbspn olive oil
• Salt

Instructions

We have a microwave oven - if you don’t have one of these you’ll probably have to figure something out on your stovetop.

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
2. Cut broccoli into bite-size pieces. Toss together with cherry tomatoes, 1 tspn salt and 1 Tbspn olive oil.
3. Put on tray with salmon, and roast in oven for 20 minutes.
4. In the meantime - get a pot of water to boil the pasta. Put 1 tspn of salt in the water as well.
5. Cook the pasta - do at least a minute less than the time on the packaging. Drain all the water out once it’s done.
6. Mix in the sauce, salmon and veg into the pot with the pasta for a minute or two with low heat.

And you’re done! One thing I like about this is that it’s fairly low effort - you can leave the salmon in the oven and go off and do other things.

I’ll admit though even with 50g of pesto paste, it doesn’t really come out that pesto-y. I think the 50g is quite a chunk of calories so I’m not sure I want to up it anymore than that though.