It’s a serious, if Monty Python-ish question: How wet would you like your fish?
There are a zillion recipes out there for curing fish both dry (with salt and, usually, some sugar and spices) or wet (in some kind of brine). They have huge variations in the amount of time spent curing, on whether or not you should weigh down the fish, turn it, drain it, how much salt to use, and so on. But the bottom line is, how much moisture do you want in the finished product? Answer that precisely and the rest is pure mechanics.
What got me thinking about this was a hands-off, three-day gravlax recipe in a recent Bon Appetit. The pictures were great, of course, and as I read through the recipe I went through my own mental dry-cured checklist:
Grated citrus rind – Damn, I thought I was the only one that knew to do that.
High salt-to-fish ratio – OK, whatever. Extra salt doesn’t matter after a certain point.
High sugar to salt ratio, almost half and half – Maybe a little sweet.
Not a lot of black pepper – So, sweet and citrus-y rather than savory.
Wrap the fish in parchment, then plastic – Goodness. How will wet paper help?
Heavy weight for three solid days – I like it.
No draining or turning – Seriously? No draining at all?
The issue at hand is that salt, weight, time and a little air-drying will squish around 10% of the water out of a fish, which puts it in gravlax territory. But leaving the fish in salty water is, effectively, putting it in a brine. Fish lolling in brine will puff up by around 5% after just one hour. Wouldn’t salting a fish without draining it create a kind of fish-powered water pump?
Once or twice in my cured fish career, I have left salmon sitting too long in the juices that flow out after it’s salted. If you wait much longer than about 12 hours before draining, the juices start to reabsorb, and the result is pretty puckery, especially below the waterline. The salinity in the fish will redistribute in another day or two, but it will still be a very salty product – not inedible, IMHO, but nothing I’d like to serve to my cardiologist.
Where did this mysterious, no-drain recipe come from? There being nothing new under the internet sun, a quick check revealed attributions of parchment paper, heavy weight, and a no-drain approach to gravlax in the culinary work of Mario Batali, Umami Girl, and the honest-to-God CIA (Culinary Institute of America, of course). So what gives?
Maybe the parchment paper soaks up a lot of the brine and doesn’t give it back, or has some other mystic chemical properties? I also noticed that these paper-wrapped salmon recipes also specified use of a sheet pan. If the fish liquid has room to spread out and evaporate rather than accumulate, could that be the secret?
I decided not to find out.
I mean really, Eaters. How hard is it to drain fish? I like draining fish. If I set up some gravlax in the AM or PM, by that PM or AM I am itching to take a look at it, and pour off any excess fluids before I either go to bed or start the day. In fact, in my fridge at this very moment and sharing a common drainage in the same large baking dish, is a mixture of two pounds of classic pastrami-cured salmon and an extra experimental pound cured with soy, mirin, garlic and ginger. I drained it of about a quarter inch of Jewish-Japanese fish juice this morning, after its first twelve hours under a foil-wrapped brick. A finger dipped in the brine tasted wonderfully of licorice (from the fennel in the pastrami cure and a dab of aquavit) and ginger.
I wondered: might one make a savory gingerbread with caraway seeds? A rice bowl with soy-cured salmon, wild rice and fennel?
Why would I not want to drain my fish? Not only does it keep things clean and salted the way I expect, it’s a perfect time to dream about the culinary future. Kind of the reverse of the reverie I experience when I take out the garbage, which I call Remembrance of Things Passed.
If this sounds a bit out there, Eaters, perhaps you can profit by my harmless eccentricity. What follows are some general kitchen science observations recorded in the pursuit of dry-cured salmon. But even before we get into anything remotely recipe-like, here is Poppa Larry’s cold fish water extraction rubric:
