As I was just learning how to properly and simply cook the Nordic fish in the oven, I decided to step up a bit further and try something bravely: what would happen if I put some salmon inside some pastry together with… mushrooms maybe? And which type of dough? which which hmm.. puff dough for sure.. Ok, I could do that.. And I could even find a friend that would be willing to taste it with me. So, I got into the business and I became intimate with salmon this time, with a very much hands-in experience!

Ok, you may not find this recipe a groundbreaking one, extremely experimental and one-of-a-kind.. But for me, it was quite groundbreaking, since I tried, for the first time in my life, filling this type of salty pastry with some kind of fish… The result, though, was fantastic: my friend just loved it! The portions, I thought, were quite big but he said that it was ok; well he liked it so much that he even ate half of mine – it was too big for me at least..

So, here is my personal groundbreaking recipe:

Ingredients:

(for 2 people)
2 thin slices of salmon – boneless (ruodoton)
2 onions
200 gr. mushrooms
2 sheets of puff dough (voitaikina levyjä)
2 table spoons ricotta cheese
1 coffee spoon olive oil
salt
pepper
1 egg yolk
Flour (just to help with rolling out the dough, as you will read below)
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1. Chop mushrooms and onions into really small pieces.

2. Put 1 coffee spoon of olive oil in a pan. In medium heat, stir onions first, until they soften a bit. Then add mushrooms and increase the heat just a little bit. Stir it altogether until the mushrooms get quite brown. Add a lot of salt pepper. It must be really spicy. When you are done, take it away from heat and let it cool down for a while.

3. When it is cooler, add ricotta cheese and mix it well. Taste the mixture, if you find it not spicy enough, you can add some more pepper. If it tastes fine, put the pan inside the fridge as you prepare other things.

4. Heat the oven to 200C.

5. Take 2 sheets of dough (if you buy Myllyn Paras labeled dough as I do you will see that the pieces are rectangular) and cut them into 2 pieces to have 4 square pieces (in the photo below you see 6 pieces – do not be confused, the other 2 pieces were just for some experiments..).

6. Get your rolling pin in your hand. Put some flour on the pin so that it doesn’t stick on the dough while you are rolling. Repeat this again and again whenever you see that it starts sticking on the dough.

7. Take one square pieces of dough. Cover both surfaces with flour and roll it out until you get a large and thin square. Repeat this for all the pieces.

8. Take one of the salmon slices. Chop it into smaller pieces – however small you like, to put on the rolled out dough pieces. Season each piece, both surfaces, with salt and pepper. I made the mushroom – onion mixture quite spicy so I added just a little bit of salt and pepper on the salmon pieces.

9. Put salmon pieces in the center of one dough pieces. Leave some space close to the edges as you see in the photo. On the salmon, add some mushroom mixture, until you cover all the salmon. In order to be able to feel the taste of all, I put really lots of mushroom mixture since salmon has a rather dominant taste.

10. Put another sheet of dough on this one with salmon and mushroom and stick the edges of both sheets to each other. There was too much of dough without the filling in my pieces in the end, so next time I will try to stick them in another way. You can of course cut away those parts – which I actually did with one of the pieces, as you will see in the picture for step 10. Make three cuts on the final surface – so that the air can come out of the puff piece in the oven.

11. Put the pastry on the oven tray with some baking sheet on. In a little bowl, put 1 egg yolk and brush it on the pastry. When the oven is warm enough, put it inside the oven, in middle section. Bake it until the surface of the pastry turns golden brown.

I was afraid that the whole idea of such a pastry with fish like salmon would be quite heavy but in the end it wasn’t. As I said, my friend just LOVED it! Now I feel even more confident with fish… Salmon? Bring it on!