Skeptical about cream cheese in a soup? Well all I can say is don’t knock it ’til you try it. In fact it might be worth giving this chowder a whirl, if only to prove that cream cheese doesn’t need the accompaniment of a bagel or cracker to sing. The truth of the matter is, however, that the rest of the ensemble make it equally worthy of your attention, with chunks of potato and salmon centre-stage, backed by a creamy chorus of leeks, while dill and lemon provide the harmonies. Together, they perform quite beautifully.
Potato, Salmon and Cream Cheese Chowder, Serves 3-4
Ingredients:
- 3 smallish leeks (white and light green parts – should yield about 200g)
- 2 cloves garlic
- 400g potatoes (2 medium sized spuds)
- 2 tblsp butter
- 150g cream cheese
- 1 tsp fine salt or to taste
- 250ml milk
- approx. 150ml water
- 280g salmon fillets
- 2 tblsp chopped dill
- 2 tblsp lemon juice
- freshly ground black pepper
- chopped flat leaf parsley and lemon zest to serve
- Slice the white and light green parts of the leeks thinly and finely chop the garlic. Scrub the potatoes and, leaving the skin on, chop into approx. 1cm cubes.
- Place a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat, add the butter and allow it to melt.
- Add the garlic and leeks to the pan, sauté over medium low heat until soft, about 5-7 minutes.
- Add the potato cubes, cream cheese and salt and toss with the leeks. When the cream cheese has melted, add the milk andwater, enough to just cover the veggies.
- Increase the heat to medium, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 25-30 minutes or until the potatoes are fork tender.
- Meanwhile, chop the salmon fillets into approx. 1cm cubes, leaving the skin on if it hasn’t already been removed.
- When the potatoes have cooked, add the chopped dill, lemon juice, salmon pieces and a few twists of black pepper to the pot. Stir to mix and simmer very gently for 5-7 minutes or until the salmon pieces are just cooked through. The chowder will be fairly thick, so thin with additional hot water if you prefer a thinner consistency.
- Remove from the heat and serve, scattered with some chopped flat leaf parsley and a little sprinkling of lemon zest.
Aoife Cox likes spuds. A lot. Her somewhat obsessive relationship with our national tuber will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her blog, The Daily Spud, or to those who loiter about in the vicinity of @DailySpud on Twitter.
Hmm, the picture is drawing a blank there – ’tis buried in gmail somewhere. Would be so much nicer for everyone to see what it looks like!
Beautiful warm delicious dish, utterly ruined by chopped parsley.
I wish people would stop chopping parsley and using it as a garnish. If you simply must add it for some odd reason at least use a sprig of the stuff, that way it can be lifted off and hurled as far away as possible. Ghastly vile green nastiness. It’s not even on the menu half the time, yet it arrives unasked for on nearly everything I order, resulting in me sending things back to the kitchen or gamely trying to pick every tiny fetid piece out of my food.
A garnish should be just that, a garnish, removable if required.
Sorry that you feel that way about parsley Arlene. I feel differently (well, clearly, or I wouldn’t have used it). I guess when I add chopped whatever-it-is to dishes, I’m doing so not so much for decoration, but because I think it adds something to the taste of the dish. Of course I hope people won’t want to go and pick the bits out afterward, but each to their own.
For sure, and the rest of the dish looks amazing. It wasn’t meant as a fiery boo, just that I run a near nerve wracking gauntlet with that dreaded plant every time I go out for food, even saying ‘please don’t put parsley on my food’ doesn’t save me as chef’s just toss it on as a matter of habit.
Me loves parsley! Hmmmmmm. I put it on everything so Arlene is right, there’s a lobbing on tendency even when it’s not in a recipe. I love fish dishes. My other half cooked up something very similar t’other night (taking much too long to do so and talking out loud to himself), but using cod insteaqd. I’d love to try this chowder recipe but am scared the cream cheese might look like a series of slippy snail paths. I’ll let you know.
Nah Arlene, dill is the true enemy. We could play a rock-paper-scissors game: dill-parsley-coriander. Ha-ha.
This does look delicious tho, Spud. I shall definitely be making it asap. I have spent several years in search of the best chowder in the world ever. Closest I came was a truckstop in Nova Scotia. My problem with chowder is that crazy carnivores tend to throw bits of bacon it it. Ugh. Not this one though, and the cream cheese may well be the secret ingredient that the best chowder in the world needs.
June, I put a dollop of cream cheese into tomato-based pasta sauces to bind them. It melts perfectly, kinda like cream with chutzpah, and is snail-trail free.