The Cure for Fish

Being a former Montrealer, it goes without saying that I love a good bagel. And nothing goes better with a good bagel than cream cheese and gravlax.

It never occurred to me that I could make my own gravlax until I went to a wine tasting event and encountered a chef who was doing a cooking demonstration. He did a great job of illustrating how absurdly easy it is to cure fish: encrusting it in salt and sugar, weighting it down (with something like a heavy cutting board), leaving it a day or two in the fridge, and voilà.

At first, I had some anxiety about salt's effectiveness at killing unwanted bacteria, but if mankind has been preserving food with salt for millennia, then surely I can do it too.

Different chefs have varying ideas about the best salt-to-sugar ratio. The first time I cured salmon, I did a 50-50 ratio. The result was far too salty and required a lot of rinsing before it became edible. I've gradually decreased the amount of salt with each subsequent attempt. Most recently, I used two parts sugar to one part salt. It was a touch sweeter than I'd like. So perhaps a touch less sugar next time?

Scandinavians traditionally add dill and sometimes vodka or aquavit to the curing mix. I had fresh dill, so I used it. But there's really no hard-and-fast rule that says you can't add other kinds of seasonings. I had kept the salt from when I pickled some limes. Using it in the curing mix yielded gravlax with a faint lime aroma.

For easy clean-up, chef Jacques Pepin likes to wrap the fish with the curing mixture in plastic wrap, then seals the whole bundle in aluminum foil before weighting it down. This way, any moisture sucked out of the fish doesn't dribble all over your refrigerator. Pretty neat.