72 Hours for Gravlax: a journey
That's right: a journey. A journey of self-discovery. A journey of learning. A journey of patience. A journey of thrift. And at last, a destination of sweet salty tasty melt-in-your-mouth salmon.
Gravlax, much like it's cousin lox, is good on thing such as crackers, bagels & cream cheese, and plain by itself. However, unlike lox, gravlax is simply cured salmon, and can be made at home. I suppose one could make lox at home, too, if one had a smoker, and this one doesn't have a smoker.
It takes 72 hours to make gravlax. It could take longer, but I'm impatient. My first batch of gravlax cost me a total of about $4.50 for approximately 4 servings. As you may see, gravlax is much cheaper than lox, which was the main reasoning behind making it. I <3 me the lox, but can't afford the massive Costco package every 2 weeks. Plus, the Costco package? Is too big for one person to eat. So here we go.
Gravlax (center) presented with hummus (left) and ajvar (right).
After searching online for good gravlax recipes, I ended up not using any of them, but found one in my "Helen Corbitt Cooks For Company" cookbook. Seriously, if you can find one of these at a used bookstore or online, grab it. So good.
You can click on the photo of the recipe above to read it... Helen's rather verbose. As you can see, I used pre-packaged pre-frozen salmon from Costco. It's the only fresh-type salmon I can get here that's kosher, and half of the reason I wanted to make sure the gravlax would turn out alright before attempting to serve it to people. I just thawed it out in the fridge like normal before putting everything together. Now, Helen's recipe calls for 3-3.5 lbs of salmon, and I wasn't all that into making that much gravlax, so while the "picking" mixture and everything else I put together was according to the recipe, I just eyed it when adding the ingredients to the salmon - therefore I have quite a bit of the salt/sugar/pepper stuff left I have stored in a jar for the next batch.
I also put everything in a ziplock bag, as it just made things easier. Too bad Helen didn't think of that. Oh, and just as an aside, before sealing up the bag, I added a glug of vodka, as that seemed to be the thing to do - many of the gravlax recipes online use vodka to help cure the fish.
After putting everything together, I placed the salmon-sandwich in a bottom of a bowl and put another flat-bottomed bowl on top with my pie weights in it, otherwise known as dry pink beans. I used this weight system for about a day and a half until I realized I wasn't getting the compression I wanted, so I switched the pie weight bowl with just a cheeseboard that was slightly larger than the samon and placed the weights directly atop that. That worked rather well, I think.
After all was said and done and the 72 hours had passed, I pulled the salmon out, scraped the pickling junk off, and sliced it up, tasting from each side, middle, and end of the fish to check of consistency. I noticed that the fattier fish tasted the best, while the less fatty fish got more rubbery. The flavor was consistent throughout, and was really really quite good.
After I had sliced it all up, I added just a little lemon juice to the fish. While any acid sears the edges of the salmon, I like the taste of it, so I don't let it ruin the presentation (which, by the way, was all for myself). Dotted with some sriracha/"cock sauce" and eaten with some hummus and ajvar, it was a lovely little snack for someone who is as ill-prepared as I, not having crackers, bagels, or cheese in the house with which to eat it. It was awesome being able to eat something like that that was cured by me. Being the first curing/pickling I've ever done by myself, it turned out very well. The only thing I would change was how I cut it, and that had more to do with the cutting surface than the fish. Gravlax = good. Now I have to work on getting the rest of the scandanavian dishes down...
