Pickled Salmon, Nordic Style

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This month's challenge for the Creative Cooking Crew was Pickle it!

Still a few days to post your dish and send link and picture to Joan, as the round-up will be going live on September, 30th.

I am trying to pickle some else, something you can enjoy during long slow Winter and that might remind you of sunny and warm Summer days.

By now a simple pickle you can do every time of the year and just added to the Christmas parties' what-to-do list.

Raw spiced pickled salmon, well known as gravlax or gravad lax (Swedish), gravad laks (Danish), gravlaks (Norwegian, Danish), graavilohi (Finnish), graavilõhe (Estonian), graflax (Icelandic) is a Nordic dish consisting of raw salmon, cured in salt, sugar, and dill. Gravlax is usually served as an appetizer, sliced thinly and accompanied by hovmästarsås (literally steward sauce, also known as gravlaxsås), a dill and mustard sauce, either on bread of some kind, or with boiled potatoes (from wikipedia).

During the Middle Ages, gravlax was made by fishermen, who salted the salmon and lightly fermented it by burying it in the sand above the high-tide line. The word gravlax comes from the Scandinavian word grav, which literally means grave (in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish), and lax (or laks), which means salmon, thus gravlax means buried salmon.
Today fermentation is no longer used in the production process. Instead the salmon is buried in a dry marinade of salt, sugar, and dill, and cured for a few days. As the salmon cures, by the action of osmosis, the moisture turns the dry cure into a highly concentrated brine, which can be used in Scandinavian cooking as part of a sauce. This same method of curing can be used for any fatty fish, but salmon is the most common.

You need:

two fillets of fresh salmon with skin *
mixture of salt and sugar (2/3 and 1/3)
fresh dill
pink peppercorns

Put a parchment paper in a baking dish and sprinkle half of the mix salt/sugar.
Check out that any bones have been removed, in case a tweezer might fit.
Lay a fillet with the part of the skin in contact with the mixture of salt/sugar.
Sprinkle with dill and pink peppercorns and then place over the other fillet, flesh against flesh.
Cover with the mixture of salt/sugar left and pack properly. Store in the refrigerator, turning the package into the pan every day (a weight on top of the package might help to improve the marinate).

 

Once you have the desired marinate (usually 3 days), open the package and remove salt, sugar, peppercorns and dill and store the salmon in an airtight container (will be good for about a week).
Serve the salmon sliced or roughly chopped, accompanied by toast and butter or a dill sauce or boiled potatoes.

Dill Sauce (hovmästarsås): 2 tablespoons sweet mustard, 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon sugar cane, 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, 1 teaspoon finely chopped dill, lemon juice . Mix ingredients together, dosing the lemon juice as needed.