The recipe I am sharing with you today was part of my pre-baby meal prep, so we’ve had these baked salmon cakes frozen and have been enjoying them since the baby arrived. More recently these delicious gluten-free baked salmon cakes have become an easy-to-make meal when I have ten minutes to prep dinner.
At this point, we basically need to be marine biologists, toxicologists, and nutritionists if we want fish to be a regular part of the diet. It’s gotten very complicated, which is why I rarely share any fish recipes. I do eat fish, though only once a week or every two weeks. When I was pregnant it was closer to once a month. This was for two reasons: the first being that the smell of fish was often hard for me to take, but more so due to the toxicity level in fish. While pregnant, the most efficient way for our body to detox is via the placenta and into the baby.
Choosing Fish
The tricky part of choosing fish is that most resources will offer you a rating based on sustainability, or you’ll find resources that offer a rating based on mercury levels for personal health. Sustainable fish choices and healthy fish choices aren’t always the same. This conundrum could really use a solid Venn diagram I think. I have a full post about choosing sustainable fish here.
Seafoodwatch.org is an incredibly in-depth resource for looking into the sustainability of the fish you choose, but it won’t tell you the health implications. That’s where this list of mercury levels in fish comes in.
I eat fish, usually choosing salmon, local lake trout, snapper, and anchovies. I’ll also eat sardines. I won’t touch tuna (due to mercury and overfishing). Tilapia, despite its low rating on the mercury front, is a little suspect unless you know with absolute certainty where it came from, as too often the answer is a cesspool fish farm in China. Sole is delicious, but you have to know that it’s from a sustainable source. I could go on, but the reality is that deciding what fish to eat, then looking into how and where it was grown, and the health of it, is often more work than any of us want to do when we’re ordering or making dinner. Which brings me to today’s recipe, because I’ve done that work for you.
Gluten-Free Baked Salmon Cakes with Tinned Salmon
As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of this recipe is to have a quick, easy, and nutrient dense meal that can be made fresh and enjoyed right out of the oven, or frozen to enjoy later. This is why I use canned salmon. It’s an easy one to stock up on and have available, even if you haven’t been to your local fish monger that day.
This is the brand of canned fish I use. I choose wild north pacific salmon, packed in water with the skin and the bones and I keep both in. Yes, I make this with the bones.
Why Bone In?
A younger, less mature version of me, might make a joke here about the phrase “bone-in” but being a mother now, I’ve matured. Slightly. The bones in tinned salmon are crumbly. That’s why I keep them in. We can eat them without even noticing they are there and the bones serve as a rockstar source of calcium. They will simply mash right in with the rest of the fish and vegetables that go into this recipe.
Ready to get cooking?
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Delicious baked gluten-free salmon cakes or salmon patties,
Ingredients
Scale
2 6-ounce tins of wild salmon (bones in), drained
2 eggs, beaten
2 Tbsp minced red onion or green onion
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/4 cup chopped red pepper
2 tsp dijon mustard
1/4 cup chickpea flour
1/4 tsp sea salt
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350 and line cookie sheet with parchment paper.
Mix all ingredients together. If consistency remains too wet, add a little more flour.
Using a 1/3 cup measure, form mix into patties on a cookie sheet.
Bake for 12 minutes. Remove from oven, flip salmon cakes over with a spatula and bake for another 5 minutes.
Remove from oven and serve warm or at room temperature.
Notes
Freeze for Later These salmon cakes are an awesome make-ahead-meal. Follow the cooking directions above. Once cooled, freeze on parchment lined cookie sheet. Once frozen, transfer to a freezer bag or freezer container. To defrost, you can do so at room temperature or place in the oven at 250 for 20 minutes.
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