You don’t have to be a meal prepper to appreciate the convenience of having leftover salmon in the fridge. Flaking up those fishes right into a variety of dishes is a shortcut to healthy, delicious midweek meals packed with lean protein and essential nutrients.
The next time you’re preparing wild-caught salmon fillets for a meal, cook a few extra so that you’ll have leftovers to flake into your next breakfast, lunch or dinner. Monica (Wild Alaskan Company’s founder’s wife!) recently brainstormed ways that leftover salmon can elevate classic comfort foods. We highly recommend you check out her list for some flaked salmon culinary inspo.
Or, look to one of these easy recipes to bring your leftover salmon ideas to life:
Quick and Easy Seafood Pancakes
Ready in 15 minutes or less, these savory, crispy Korean-style seafood pancakes are a cinch to make and the perfect vehicle for flaked salmon. You can certainly use smoked salmon in these pancakes, but leftover salmon fillets work equally well.
Seafood Pizza
Have a premade pizza crust you’ve been meaning to use? Or perhaps some pita rounds that you’d like to transform into a personal pie? We’ve got a build-your-own-pizza guide that’ll help channel your culinary creativity into a tasty seafood pizza that has all the elements you love, and some delightfully unexpected ones too. (Personally, we love our seafood pizzas with flaked sockeye!)
Salmon Souffle
Okay, so a souffle is probably not your everyday meal choice, but when you have leftover salmon stashed in your fridge, an impromptu salmon souffle is surprisingly easy to make — and you need only a few kitchen staples to pull it all together.
Salmon Onigiri
Steam up a batch of sushi rice and get sculpting! Onigiri are Japanese-style rice balls/triangles/shapes that you can enjoy as portable meals, filled with a tasty, highly seasoned morsel — which, in this case, ought to be a bite of wild salmon. You can use any cooked fillet of salmon for this, but something that was marinated with soy or miso would fit perfectly.
Salmon Arepas
For an easy Colombian-inspired meal that puts leftover, flaked salmon to delicious use, try making what we like to call pink arepas by working some salmon into each round of arepa dough. Or, save the salmon as a topping to sprinkle onto the finished arepas.
Salmon Congee
Often consumed as a breakfast, congee is the perfect day-after dish. Adapt our recipe for salmon congee by substituting flaked, cooked salmon as the star of the meal. It’s just the trick for dressing up what is otherwise a plain bowl of rice porridge.
Leftover Salmon Cakes
Got a couple fillets of salmon from last night's dinner? Got a few other basics and random things in the fridge too? Well, you probably have everything you need to make leftover salmon cakes. Our guide to making fish cakes will walk you through how to do this, with whatever you have in your kitchen right now.
Salmon Pasta
Here’s a simple formula for an easy lunch: Boil a pot of pasta, spoon in a few generous dollops of pesto, and scatter in flaked salmon. Or, if you’ve got a little more time to spend cooking, try our recipe for an herbaceous sockeye salmon power pasta.