Gravlax — Marinated Salmon

🖨️ Print post

This gourmet delicacy is so easy to make yourself—why pay dozens of dollars per pound to purchase it from a delicatessen? This recipe reflects the fourth of our 11 Wise Traditions Dietary Principles: eat some animal foods raw; cook most plant foods.

Ingredients

• 2-3 pounds fresh wild-caught salmon, center cut, cleaned, scaled, with skin left on, cut into 2 filets
• ¼ cup sea salt
• ¼ cup Rapadura or Sucanat
• 2 tablespoons green peppercorns, crushed
• ¼ cup whey
• 2 large bunches fresh dill, snipped

Instructions

1. Using pliers, remove any small bones in the filets.
2. Rinse well and pat dry.
3. Mix Rapadura, peppercorns and salt together and rub thoroughly into the flesh side of both filets.
4. Sprinkle with whey and cover both filets with dill.
5. Place the filets flesh side together and wrap well in plastic wrap. Wrap all in aluminum foil. Place between two cookie sheets and set a heavy weight, such as a brick, on top. [An alternative to Sally’s original instructions is to use glass storage containers with silicone and no plastic parts. Some recipe authors assert that this solution works well and that a weight isn’t necessary. We now know that dangerous chemicals can leech from plastic wrap into food, especially fatty foods like salmon.]
6. Refrigerate at least 2 days and as long as 6 days, turning every 12 hours or so.
7. To serve, remove foil and plastic wrap.[Or take out of glass storage containers.] Slice thinly on the diagonal.
8. Serve as an hors d’oeuvre with sour dough bread or round croutons and fresh chives or finely chopped onion; or on individual plates with a similar garnish and lemon wedges.

A note about Rapadura. It is the commercial name for dehydrated cane sugar juice, which the people of India have used for thousands of years. It is rich in minerals, particularly silica. Rapadura has a wonderful flavor and closely mimics sugar in chemical properties. It gives the best results for cookies and cakes but be careful not to overdo—in large amounts Rapadura can upset the body chemistry just as much as sugar. [Other names for rapadura sugar are jaggery, kokuto, and sucanat.]

Here is an alternative recipe uses honey instead. Here is an alternative recipe with no sweetener at all!

🖨️ Print post