Keep it Simple with Smoked Salmon Pasta

While many cream sauces involve cooking butter and flour to make a bechamel, its a lot of work, and I find the extra butter makes the sauce a little too rich for my tastes. Thats why I like using a simpler approach.

This dish is so simple in fact, that I can give you the recipe in one sentence: Boil the pasta, puree the sauce ingredients, reduce the sauce ingredients and coat the pasta and smoked salmon in the sauce. All of this takes about 10 minutes.

By reducing cream and milk with cheese it creates a rich, creamy sauce that coats each strand of noodle without any added flour or butter; by pureeing basil into the sauce, it gives the sauce a gorgeous green hue and pesto-like flavor without adding any effort. The sauce then gets tossed together with the al dente noodles and salmon, coating each strand of pasta, while gently cooking the salmon with the residual heat.

Scanning through the recipe, you might be wondering why theres no salt. Thats because the smoked salmon, cheese and the boiling water for the pasta should impart plenty of sodium into the dish. That said, some smoked salmon is less salty than others, so if you taste it and feel like it needs more, you can add some salt at the very end.