This is an update to one of the first posts I put on Duck and Roses. The recipe has improved and is now supported by a video of the recipe.
I love smoke cured salmon – there’s no two ways about it. I love the creamy oily texture, the smoky and salty punch and how it combines so wonderfully with capers, dill and cream cheese on a warmed bagel. The difficulty with home smoking is that most foods end up cooked. When smoking in an enclosed smoking box, for example, the heat used to produce the smoke is enough to cook the food. Smoked salmon is cold smoked, so unless you have specialised equipment or indeed a smokehouse hanging around the back garden – maybe one day – the next best thing is to cure the salmon with salt.
Curing fish with salt and sugar has been practised in Scandanavia for many centuries; today it is known as gravlax, gravadlax or lox in English speaking countries. The purpose of curing with salt and sugar is to preserve the salmon as well as impart a salted taste. The salt also causes the salmon to lose some of its moisture as well as a breakdown of some of the salmon proteins which in turn tenderises the fish.
So with that said, I have used the historical base of salmon fillet, salt and sugar and played around with curing salmon by adding various additional flavours and varying curing times to get a lightly salted salmon with a fragrant nuance.
In this recipe I am using a 450g piece of salmon – it’s fresh Tasmanian Atlantic salmon. I’d say it’s not as good as the freshwater variety but still works extremely well – and is a very tasty fish. Now I used to remove the skin before I cured, but I’ve found that this dries out the salmon too much and the saltiness is too intense – and yes you can reduce the curing time to minimise that, but you also want to cure it long enough for the zest and spices to impart their flavour. Leaving the skin on was a great compromise. I just cut the salmon way from the skin as and when I need it.
When you’ve made it you’ll be able see how the oil in the fish has developed and created that cold-smoked salmon texture. This citrus cured salmon is great on water crackers, rye bread, on bagels, in potato croquettes and is stunning in pasta – you drop it in at the end so you have a combination of cooked and uncooked salmon – fantastic.
So without further ado lets salt cure some salmon.
3 comments
Can you do this with other types of fish – or which types are good for curing?
The method I describe here tends to work on oil fishy. Rainbow trout is another excellent fish to salt cure. I guess you could also try sardines and of course anchovies. Mackerel is another great oily fish, but it is not eaten too often here in Australia, so can be difficult to find. According to a local fishmonger, mackerel are caught as bait for tuna. If the fishing trawlers are not able to fish for tuna, usually due to inclement weather, they bring the mackerel back to sell. This is why when mackerel is available it’s usually a one-off and every fishmonger has it.
I must admit I haven’t tried salt-curing ‘white’ fish – so I have no practical evidence, but I have a hunch that it would not work well.- smoking tends to be a better way to cure this type of fish – like they do in the Scotland with the Arbroath Smokies (haddock).
It got me thinking further and I do remember when I was in London being cooked ackee (a fruit) and salt fish (which is salted cod) by a Jamaican family. The process for salting the white fish is different to the curing above – maybe there’s a blog post in it 🙂