Ed's Philadelphia Smoked Salmon Tagliatelle
Ingredients
- 400 g tagliatelle (or fettucine)
- 120 g cream cheese (softened)
- 1/2 T dried chives
- 125 g smoked salmon
- 1 T lemon juice
- 100 mL milk
- salt (to taste)
- pepper (to taste)
Method
Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling water for about 8 minutes or as directed on the pack. Meanwhile, cut the smoked salmon into small strips.
When the pasta is done, drain it and leave in colander. (A splash of oil will keep it from getting sticky).
Into the still-warm pot, add the milk, cream cheese, chives, and lemon juice; stir to melt and add salt and pepper to taste. Add the pasta back to the pot into the cream cheese mix and stir well until it's all incorporated. Fold the smoked salmon in gently; finish with a grind of black pepper.
Notes
SJ Note 20 Oct 2009: After considering that most pasta & sauce recipes here seem to yield a tiny bit of sauce for a large amount of pasta, we cut the pasta amount down to 120g (our usual amount for two), and left the rest of the measurements the same. The original recipe doesn't call for softening the cream cheese, but I had to turn on the heat to get the cold cream cheese to melt, so I'd advise you to do so, if you have time. We'd run out of lemon juice and I hadn't realized it, so we used a bit of lemon extract, which was probably for the best: the sauce came out really, really runny; we used a corn starch slurry to thicken it up. While that was combining with the heat to do its thing, I added some flavor. I'd expected it to be on the bland side, but I hadn't expected to need to pull *7* bottles from my spice racks to fix it. I added dill (because salmon + lemon just cries out for dill); garlic powder and onion powder (because it seemed weird without those); tarragon (mostly to try it); white pepper, crushed red chillies, and Emeril's Essence (because it needed some kick). We also added parmesan. By the time the sauce was fixed, the salmon was drowned out, and I could hardly taste it. In the future, we'll stick with a basic alfredo sauce; I have to conclude this was some attempt at something that seems "healthier" than alfredo, or some such nonsense. If you try it, I'd advise double cream or heavy cream instead of the milk, to help with the thinness of the sauce.