Salmon Patties Recipe with Flaxseed (Gluten Free, High Protein)

My favorite salmon patties recipe turns simple, inexpensive canned salmon and ground flaxseed into tender, flavorful patties without breadcrumbs. They’re a quick, flavorful way to get a healthy dinner on the table with pantry staples you can keep on hand.

This is another recipe in our occasional, ongoing series of easy meals from your pantry! For this series “pantry” includes not only the pantry shelves, but also the things we may have (or that we preserved!) in our fridges and freezers, too.

I love, love, love salmon. That and shrimp are the two things I order at restaurants, if they’re available. Steak-schmake, I’ll always take a salmon filet or a shrimp skewer over it any day.

The only problem with salmon (and you probably knew this was coming…) is the price. Yikes. I don’t do farmed salmon with added dyes (yuck), so that leaves wild caught Alaskan salmon (did you know there’s no wild “Atlantic Salmon?” There used to be, but it was fished to near extinction many years ago, so it’s an endangered species now, meaning when you see that label it means farmed fish, often not from the US). Oh my goodness, can that set our food budget back.

So fresh salmon is a rare treat around here, and mostly seasonal since that’s when the prices are even in the realm of possibility. But what’s a girl to do who loves salmon? One who not only likes it, but would also like to add it’s omega-3 fats to her diet?

The answer, of course, is canned salmon. But I’ve found there are all kinds of canned salmon and just having the label of  “wild caught” isn’t always enough. The cheaper, larger cans seem to taste more like tuna than salmon when making a tuna-like salmon salad, so I usually buy smaller 6-oz. cans that cost a bit more, but have more chunks and actually taste like salmon (Trader Joe’s and Costco, I’ve found).

However, if you make salmon patties you can use any old can of salmon you have, which is great for our pantries and pocketbooks.

Easy Salmon Patties Recipe

I’ve spent literal years trying to find a salmon patty that:

• Actually tasted like salmon after mixing and cooking.
• Stayed together in a patty form when cooking.
• Didn’t have a mushy texture.
• Didn’t have a lot of fillers.

I had no idea how hard that would be. I decided right away I didn’t like mayo-based patties (I felt the mayo contributed to the lack of salmon flavor and mushy texture), so that eliminated many recipes out there and I’ve spent the last year perfecting a recipe I created using the simplest of bases:

salmon + egg + a few seasonings + small amount of binder

For most of that time I used our frozen, homemade bread crumbs for the binder, but I was never really happy with it. And then I read in a magazine about combining salmon and flax seed meal to increase our Omega-3s and a lightbulb went off: why not use that instead of breadcrumbs in my recipe as the binder, increasing the health value of the patties as a result?

Happily, the results were fabulous and the patties have become a regular part of our dinner menus as well as meal prep for weekday lunches (they reheat beautifully in an air fryer). They have great taste and great texture with simple, healthy pantry ingredients.

The other (unintended) result? The flaxseed also makes them gluten free which is nice for those who need to avoid it. And they are high protein, low carb with 11 grams protein, 2 grams carbs, and 6 grams fat per patty. It just gets better and better.

Ideas for Serving Canned Salmon

I will often add chunks of quality canned salmon to our chef salads, sprinkled over creamy pesto pasta, or used as a cracker topping. For dinners, though, I mainly make salmon patties. Here are some ways I serve them:

• With a simple salad (lettuce tossed with garbanzo beans, carrots and onions dressed with a vinaigrette or honey mustard dressing) and pesto pasta (as shown in the photos).
• With Asian flavored noodles (like this recipe, made with any veg that’s in season), either warm or cold.
• As a salmon burger with a whole wheat bun (I’ll make the patties larger).

I hope you try these quick and healthy salmon patties soon!

 

 This recipe has been updated – it was originally published in 2014.