[Sca-cooks] salmon and gravlax

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>So, what do you do with the split head and the bones? I assume you 
>are saying they trimmed off the gills and threw them away. Or did 
>you get the gills?

I meant that the gills ought to be removed to make the rest of the 
head usable. They tend to produce bitter, gamy flavors in stocks made 
with fish heads. This is pretty much true of all fish... for salmon 
heads, especially, you probably want to be really careful about not 
letting a stock actually boil. The heads contain a lot of fat, and if 
you boil a stock made from them you risk getting a cloudy stock with 
some pretty powerful, fishy flavors.

>>So I think I got a better deal than $14.95 a pound for fillets. Now
>>all we have to do is figure out what to do with over six pounds of
>>gravlax.
>
>Yes, definitely a better deal. Was this a wild or a farm raised salmon?

It was farmed. There's actually been a nationwide scandal and a 
number of high-profile investigations in a number of cities in the 
past year or so concerning retailers selling "wild salmon" at over 
$20/lb in some cases, when the product was in fact farm-raised. The 
beauty of the gravad process is that it adds a lot of flavor to famed 
salmon, and the fact that it's farmed is indistinguishable to all but 
the most sensitive connoisseurs. Half of whom are talking through 
their hat anyway ;-).

>We've talked about gravlax here before, but I don't remember any 
>specific directions on making it. Since you've done this, could you 
>detail what is involved? Can you make gravlax from any fish or just 
>from salmon?

Well, the "lax" part of the word is species-specific. Lox/Lax/Lachs 
is a word used in Germanic and Scandinavian languages to denote, 
specifically, salmon. But you can make gravad trout or char, or use 
the process with just about any rich, fatty fish. I hear tuna is 
great that way. I don't know that gravflounder is such a good idea, 
but you could make quite a striking platter of gravlax alongside 
arctic char, Pacific "rock" or "black" cod (which isn't really cod), 
sablefish (IOW, the fresh fish from which smoked sable is made), all 
also known in our fickle fish marketing system in the US as "Chilean 
Sea Bass", cured in the same way. That particular fish is an 
impressive, cream-white shade, even when raw, and as rich as salmon.

  A related process is used for Greenland shark in Iceland to produce 
hakaarl, everyone's favorite "fermented"/"rotten" shark dish for 
culture-affirming, xenophobic, 
"let's-make-fun-of-foreigners-and-their-wacky-eating-habits" 
purposes, and as such provides a useful service ;-). But for the most 
part, hakaarl is an exception to the rule since the process is taken 
quite a bit farther than it usually is for gravlax.

I've provided a recipe elsewhere; let me know if you don't find it. 
The process for making gravlax (a.k.a. "buried salmon", or shark, 
char, trout, or whatever) is probably thousands of years old, and 
seems to originate in the act of burying fish in the sand above the 
high tide line at sea and lake shores above the Arctic Circle, where 
it can be cold-preserved by the permafrost without really freezing, 
and where excess moisture drains off into the sand. To keep the sand 
off the fish, and coincidentally adding flavor in the process, you 
use young branches from nearby evergreen trees or herbs to wrap the 
fish. Salt and pepper hasten the curing process, keep burrowing 
insects away, and add flavor, while sugar tenderizes the final 
product and also adds flavor.

I don't know if Icelanders today make hakaarl in their fridges, or if 
it is still buried in the sand, wrapped in spruce branch tips, but 
the key difference when making hakaarl versus gravlax is in leaving 
the fish to cure until enzymes in the fish begin to break it down, 
degrading the muscle fibers and creating a cheesy consistency. For 
gravlax you don't do this, and the desired texture is closer to that 
of raw or cold-smoked fish.

HTH,

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04