Salmon Sliders - Emily's Review

Confession time. I was being selfish when I picked out a salmon burger recipe to try for July because I knew we were going on a boat trip in SE Alaska and there was a good possibility we’d catch some salmon.

Curtis, my dad and brother came through. Just days before we returned home they came back from one of their fishing trips with this:

And my dad graciously filleted those beauties and my mom froze them so a few days later we could make this when Curtis’ mom came for dinner:


Hillary’s salmon skin removal trick worked flawlessly as always. After a quick dip in the hot water, the skin peeled right off. I felt a tad bit guilty using the beautiful salmon for burgers but to compromise I cut the fish into big chunks to maintain some integrity instead of a ground/canned fish look.

I used all the wet ingredients the recipe called for (only I doubled the amount because I was working with a lot of fish) and added some dill, brown sugar, sweet chili sauce, mayo and Sriracha sauce. I put all the ingredients (minus the salmon) in the blender – then mixed the liquid by hand, with gloves on, into the chunked salmon. I shaped the mixture into sliders and froze them on cookie sheets lined with saran wrap for a few hours in hopes they'd hold together.

We started with a grilled romaine salad and used Megan’s recipe for mustard roasted potatoes as a side dish. She’s right, that little kick of Silver Springs beer n’ brat mustard rocked on the potatoes!

Our intention was to grill the burgers but after we made our salads, we ran out of propane so we went to our back up plan and cooked them in a frying pan. I was afraid they may not hold together and we’d just have big blobs of cooked salmon but they cooked into perfect, delicious sliders.

In hindsight I was being lazy by just blending all the wet ingredients and wouldn’t do that again because instead of pieces of bright green cilantro and garlic floating in the hunks of pink salmon, the blended “sauce” gave the burgers a greenish/brown appearance. Next time I’ll take an extra five minutes to chop the ingredients before mixing them in with the salmon.

Molly, Curtis and I enjoyed the burgers although Curtis requested next time that I try the recipe as it was written. We topped them with the mango salsa and the combo was the perfect amount of spice. And this weekend we’re going to use some of our left over patties for salmon tacos.

And because we had so much fish I was inspired to try the burger recipe that I found with the curry sauce. We made it one night with the Orange Apricot Glaze and Curried Mustard Mayo.

And a second night with Barefoot Contessa’s Basil Dill Sauce.

The sauces were great, but I much preferred the July recipe for the burgers coupled with the mango salsa. This second recipe had too much cumin and other strong flavors and it overpowered the salmon.