Making Gravlax

It started when I was reading Lotta Jansdotter's book Handmade Living. I have a love for all things Nordic and I saw her recipe for gravlax and well, cured fish is just so Scandinavian and it's been so frigid here I just had to try it. (Note: I did ask Lotta about it in Palm Springs, she said it was really easy to make and her only tip was that she liked the tail pieces of the salmon best.)

Anyway.... so I bought some salmon and fresh dill and put my salmon curing sandwich together last Friday. It takes 3 days minimum to cure so I opened it up today. The process produces a liquid which you see in the first picture above.

The first step upon unwrapping your cured gravlax is to wash off the salt/pepper/sugar/dill mix. I just ran it under water and kind of rubbed until it all came off. The pepper takes a little more time but it's not too hard.

Next step, which wasn't very specific in the book (or from googling online), was to cut off the skin. I have a very sharp knife but it was kind of hard. I left some good chunks of salmon on the skin. More about that later.

When I was done, I had some nice pieces of fleshy, cured salmon, yum. It was hard to not want to eat some but I waited.

What to do with the skin pieces? I fried them up in a pan, skin and leftover flesh together, and when it was done and cooled, cut it up and fed it to Rosie! She LOVED it. I didn't give her all of it because it does have a lot of salt in it, but I kept some to give her a little each day. Salmon is really good for dog's skin, especially the long haired breeds like mine.

We didn't have any bagels or rye bread or appropriate crackers so I just plopped a nice piece of the gravlax (aka Lox) on a cream cheese smeared saltine and topped it with a sprig of fresh dill. YUM. Later, I made a spread using diced red onions, sour cream, chopped dill and dry mustard, it was wonderful!

And now, back to sewing.