Salmon Stroganoff with Butter Dill Fettuccine

As a child my all-time favorite food was stroganoff. It isn’t really that I had such sophisticated tastes... more likely, my mother was merely a charismatic cook that somehow managed to sell me on the idea of eating steak and pasta in a mushroom sauce. However it happened, I requested her stroganoff for every single birthday dinner from the age of six to nearly fifteen (when my parents stopped eating meat).

Now that I am a mother, I enjoy preparing stroganoff for my own children very much. Although we do eat red meat in our household, we’ve been trying to cut down a bit lately which is what inspired me to think about developing a stroganoff recipe that would work with fish.

Skeptical? I completely understand, and felt exactly the same way... until I found a recipe online at BigOven.Com for salmon stroganoff with butter dill sauce on a bed of fettuccine. Salmon in butter dill sauce is definitely something I have eaten in many fine restaurants and enjoyed on multiple occasions, so it didn’t seem as great of a stretch to add some cream and mushrooms.

I’ve made a few adaptations and modifications for my version, so I will give you my recipe but also provide the link to the original recipe so that its author can receive full credit and you can see another way to make the same recipe. The next time I make it, I may try substituting a tablespoon or more of Dijon mustard for the curry that we used here. Either way, it is a delicious meal – and a way to appreciate the rich ecstasy of creamy stroganoff without the meat.


Salmon Stroganoff with Butter Dill Fettuccine


What You’ll Need:

For the Salmon Stroganoff...

18 oz of fresh wild salmon
(I used Whole Catch Wild Sockeye Salmon)
8 oz Crimini mushrooms
2 cups diced onions
Large hunk of Butter
Large splash of Canola Oil
½ cup dry white wine
1 ½ cups whipping cream (or heavy cream)
1 tsp curry powder

For the Fettuccine with Butter Dill Sauce

1 pkg Tinkayada Brown Rice Fettucine (14 oz)
½ cup butter
3 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp minced fresh dill


How It Works:

Set a large pot of water to boil for your pasta. It will take a while to heat up, and Tinkyada pasta cooks for more than twice as long as normal gluten pasta. Best to get started with this part early.

Next prepare all of your ingredients. If you are using frozen salmon, defrost it in the microwave or under hot water. Whether fresh or frozen, skin and bone your salmon fillets. Slice up your mushrooms and dice your onions. Uncork your wine and measure out your curry powder, mince your dill, and slice open your fresh lemons (for the lemon juice). Once you actually get started cooking this meal, it will go very quickly so you’ll appreciate having all of the ingredients at your fingertips, ready to add.

In a very wide sauté pan (preferably a few inches deep) add a large hunk of butter and large splash of canola oil and warm it over medium heat. When it is hot but not smoking, add your diced onions and mushrooms and cook until the onions are translucent and mushrooms are slightly browned and soft. When finished, remove from pan and set aside but do not rinse pan.


Deglaze same pan with white wine and allow it to boil. Next, add whipping cream and curry powder and allow the entire mix to boil down a bit. Add your salmon fillets to this lovely yellow cream sauce and allow them to poach in the hot sauce. This will take a while (it was far longer than 5 minutes when I made the dish – more like 10!) and you will need to turn your salmon fillets over in the cream sauce to make sure that the salmon is evenly poached.


When your salmon is poached, use a wooden spoon to gently break each fillet into bite sized flakes. Pour the onion and mushroom mixture back into your cream sauce, and warm the onions and mushrooms until they match the temperature of the rest of the stroganoff.


Serve on a bed of Tinkyada fettuccine tossed with lemon butter-dill sauce. This dish isn’t just elegant... with all the cream and wine, it makes for first rate comfort food too.

Serves 4



As an interesting aside I read a story while researching this recipe about the origins of beef stroganoff, indicating that the dish hails from the Russian city of St. Petersburg where it was adapted in the 1890s to win a culinary competition and named for its chef’s patron, Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov. I wonder what the chef himself would think of my 'healthy' gluten free salmon version! I’m sure he never envisioned such an adaptation of his recipe...