salmon – chef meets girl

cold smoked salmon

i came home to the chef standing in the kitchen with a big, proud smile on his face. there he was, this mad scientist-looking lab set up on the counter, no “hello” or “I love you” — just a stammer of, “hey! look what I made! grab your camera, make a video! eat this!”

once he explained the tubes and the hookah and the burning coal it made sense. and to my satisfaction, it didn’t even make the house smell. that much. that chef, he’s pretty creative!

have you guys ever tried anything like this? or do you have any other DIY kitchen tricks?

homemade gravlax aka heaven

gravlax, lox, nova lox: we’ve come a long way from preserving salmon out of necessity. thankfully, the advent of refrigeration hasn’t killed the tradition altogether. the differences are subtle: do you add sugar to the cure or just salt? do you use aromatics like dill or juniper? do you smoke the fish after the cure? if you smoke, is the smoke hot enough to cook the fish, or do you cold smoke it?

in our case, we used salt and sugar with dill as our aromatic. initially, we decided not to smoke it (although the decision to eat without waiting to smoke may have been related to the fact that the girl was hungry for breakfast… and what the girl wants, the girl gets). later, with bellies full of gravlax, we decided to experiment with adding some smoke. stay tuned for a video. in the meantime, follow the jump for our so-easy-anyone-can-do-it curing recipe.