This Week's Recipe--Smoked Salmon Chowder

photo from Alaska Smokehouse

This recipe can be found over at the Alaska Smokehouse, but I'm going to post it here also, to see if you can spot the potential problem with this recipe as written. I didn't notice it until I was cooking it. More on that later though; here's

The Recipe
Ingredients:

• 8 cups chicken stock
• 1 cup of flour
• 1 cup onion, finely diced
• 8 ounces of Alaska Smokehouse Smoked Salmon
• 2 tablespoons of margarine
• 4 medium potatoes, cooked and cut in bite sized chunks
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup light cream
• salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:

1. Pour eight cups of chicken or vegetable stock in a large saucepan and begin to heat it up.
2. Heat on low for five minutes and then turn your burner to medium so that you slowly bring the stock to temperature.
3. In a separate large pan, melt the margarine and sauté diced onions until they are translucent.
4. Add flour to the melted margarine and stir continuously for 5 minutes.

Increase heat on stock to medium-high, and with a wire whisk, add flour, margarine and onion mixture to the liquid. Stir constantly, breaking up any lumps that form. Add Alaska Smokehouse Smoked Salmon and stir. Add potato chunks, milk, cream, and salt and pepper to taste, and continue stirring. Decrease heat to medium-low, and allow to simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently to avoid burning or sticking.

Andrea's Kitchen
Ok...so it looks yummy in the picture and I had all of the ingredients on hand, so away I go! All's going well until I hit step 4. I'll pause here and let you re-read step 4. OK, now look back up there and double check how much flour I'm stirring into how much butter. Hmmmm...1 cup of flour into 2 tablespoons of butter????? Yeah--well like I said, I didn't notice this until I was watching two pots on the stove and trying to complete step 4 with an almost 3 year old hanging on my leg and a 4 year old whining she was hungry, so I just charged ahead, following the directions. And it turned out OK...since there are spuds in there too, you don't notice all those lumps of flour that didn't dissolve! Next time I'll use the old gravy method Gma Paul used where you put the flour and some liquid in a container with a lid and shake and shake and shake. That would be much easier to get to add in smoothly. Either that or add some of the milk or broth mixture to the butter before adding the flour so it's more like a roux and less like little lumps of flour!

The other potential hang-up comes with the cooking time and the potatoes. Chopped potatoes just aren't done in 10 minutes! Luckily I saw this one coming, and adjusted the cooking time to about 18 minutes.

My final adjustment was to add about 2t. of paprika to the soup. My tasting told me it needed something more, so I tried paprika. I liked the result.

The Verdict
So after reading all of that, you're probably thinking that this recipe was a bust. But it wasn't! We all liked it, even Scott the sworn salmon-hater! Not too bad, huh?