[Sca-cooks] Re: salmon and gravlax (Stefan li Rous)

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach elisabetta at klotz.org:

>Of course his notes where disorganized on one piece of slightly 
>stained and fish
>smelling paper, and my copy of the notes and recipes are somewhere, 
>now lost but
>hopefully found in the future.

Then, of course, if this was the Baron Irik I knew, he was perfectly 
capable of writing his notes _on_ a piece of salmon...

>So from what I learned from him on that day is this--
>1-Sugar period, no evidence used in cures
>2-Honey won't work because of the chemical reactions won't cure the fish (I
>asked this question also--he said to read Alton Brown)
>3-You cure food with 3 natural chemical processes--salt, sugar and acid (ie:
>lemon)
>4-Modern palate prefers sugar
>
>I'm not an expert on curing, and except for this knowledge, I know 
>nothing about
>it, but I'm sure there is somone who can explain it much better.

My suspicion is that sugar wouldn't start to be used in curing until 
it became both cheap to use in some quantity and readily available 
for Europeans, so maybe we're talking about the 15th and 16th 
centuries.

As for curing foods with acid, another biggie is lactic acid, which 
is part of the process for corned beef, many cured sausages, and 
probably gravlax once it reaches a certain stage. It's a natural 
product of lactobacilli, which are also the beasties responsible for 
things like sauerkraut, kim chee, and Kosher dill pickles.

Sugar is also a tenderizing agent, and products with sugar in the 
cure tend to have what many regard as a better mouth feel.

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

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