Gravlax Experiment

Another thing I did while in England was attend the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.  Hands down this was the best conference I ever attended!  I went for academic interests, but came away with a new appreciation of cuisine and the importance of celebrating and preparing local foods.  

When we got back home, we were lucky enough to be given a fresh sockeye salmon by a friend.  I have wanted to make gravlax, so I thought I would give it a try.  Gravlax is a refrigerator-cured salmon using salt, sugar and lots and lots of dill.  I used this recipe from the How to Cook Meat blog, except I also added Vodka.  And here is the finished product...

The hardest part was to fillet the whole salmon, especially since my fillet knife is a dull cheapie.  Luckily you slice the cured salmon off the skin, so no one had to see the ragged, ripped-up salmon skin.  Otherwise, you just have to flip the salmon every twelve hours for three days and weigh it down.  Some recipes even skip this part and only cure it for 24 hours.  It was really good, and we ate several lunches from it, as well as taking it to a potluck where it was complemented.