A great meal doesn’t have to take a lot of time. And that’s good news if you don’t feel like spending cooking after you come home from work. This salmon with pesto and pasta is on the table in half an hour. It works with ready-made pesto, but also with the pesto that you have made yourself.
Quick meal or not. It always starts with good ingredients. That means fresh salmon, homemade pesto, good parmesan cheese and fresh pasta. We don’t do it for less.
With a big enough grill when grilling the salmon, you can also boil the water for the pasta. Everyone inside may not even notice that you are making dinner.
We deliberately left the pesto that we made a bit thicker. That way, you can use it for different recipes. To rub the salmon with it, we add a little extra olive oil to make it thinner.
You can grill the salmon by looking at how the colour of the meat changes. But then you will have to look at what the salmon looks like on the inside at a certain point. But we prefer to keep the salmon in one piece.
It is better to measure the core temperature with your Thermapen. Just as easy, and you know exactly how far your salmon is. At a core temperature of 52°C (126F), we turn off the gas under the salmon and finish the pasta.
Fresh pasta only needs 4 minutes, and in that time, we also quickly make the sauce for this pasta. In a hot skillet, we melt some butter, and in it, we heat a grated clove of garlic and a tablespoon of pesto. We mix that well. After that, we scoop the cooked pasta straight out of the pan into the sauce. The idea is that some of the cooking water ends up in the sauce.
We stir the pasta through the pesto sauce and season it with some lemon juice. Too often, you reach to the salt when the food is a bit bland, but what you usually need is a little lemon juice. That really finishes this pasta off.
Then we grate a healthy amount of Parmesan cheese over the pasta and a little bit of chilli flakes. This pasta is delicious to eat just like that. Can you imagine how good it is with the salmon?
This is our pesto salmon with pasta. The recipe below is for 2 people. Try it out and let us know in the comments below. Or better! Take a photo and post it on Instagram. Tag @bbq.heroes so we can see what you made.
Ingredients
- 400 grams of salmon
- salt and pepper
- 2 to 3 tbsp pesto
- 250 grams of fresh spaghetti
- 25 grams of butter
- a clove of grated garlic
- chilli flakes
- grated Parmesan cheese
- 2 tsp lemon juice
Instructions
- Sprinkle the salmon with salt and pepper.
- Grill the salmon over direct heat until the sides turn white. Then turn the salmon and grill the top briefly. Meanwhile, put a pot of water on to boil. And put a skillet on the fire to warm up.
- Turn the salmon one more time and then spread it with pesto.
- When the salmon has a core temperature of 52°C (126F), slide it to a cooler spot on the grill or wrap it in some aluminium foil.
- Put the pasta in the boiling water and set the timer for 4 minutes.
- Melt the butter in the skillet and add the grated garlic and a tablespoon of the pesto.
- When the pasta is cooked, scoop it out of the water into the skillet with the pesto. Stir everything well and season with some chilli flakes and a little lemon juice.
- Sprinkle the pasta with Parmesan cheese and place the grilled salmon on top of the pasta.
