As a kid, I didn’t like lox.  I really wanted to – the grownups treated it as an iconic pleasure; like sex you could talk about.  It was moist, pink and pliable, with a raw, fresh smell unlike anything else in my food world, and at nine or ten I just wasn’t ready for it.

Smoked whitefish, though, was geldt.  A golden, wizened centerpiece that looked like prehistory on a platter.  It was sweet, salty, smoky and chewable.  Best of all you got to take it apart yourself, peeling back the skin and then prying the flesh off the bone with a butter knife.  It was like eating a science project.

A truly complete post-holiday breakfast buffet would include both lox and whitefish.  Lox was always  the glamour fish, but it’s hard to say, objectively, which is better on a bagel.  In fact, objectively, I would have to try both.

Whole chunks of smoked whitefish squashed into a layer of chive cream cheese on a pumpernickel bagel is driving and elemental, like a three-chord blues.  Lox on a poppy seed bagel, by contrast, is lush and operatic.  There’s no way I can choose, except in the moment.

In a way, smoked whitefish is a true rarity.  I can’t smoke whitefish at home.  I’d be happy to try, but here in New England I can’t even buy the raw material.  Lake whitefish, coregonus clupeaformis, is fished commercially from the Great Lakes, and nearly all of their eastbound output is headed for one location: the Acme Smoked Fish corporation in Brooklyn, NY.

In my long life, I doubt I’ve ever had a smoked whitefish that wasn’t made by Acme.  In fact, until 2012, when the great smoked fish artisan Aftabudin Rayman passed away, I doubt I’ve even had a smoked whitefish that he never laid hand or eye on.  Luckily, it was a benevolent monopoly, and has since been carried on by his trainees.

Smoked whitefish from Acme or its sister brand, Blue Hill Bay, is a nice product.  Smoked whitefish salad, a kind of denatured version of the whole chunks, is another thing entirely.  No commercial processor can afford to strip off the whitefish chunks by hand, and mix them in gently with the other ingredients.  They’ll extrude it, more or less violently, resulting in more of a smooth spread than a salad.

To keep the paste from tasting oily, the Acme folks actually add whiting, to help it absorb the mayo.  I’m making this sound worse than it is, but your own whitefish salad, made fresh and a little chunky, will arrive with the force of revelation.  And it’s certainly no more effort than making a tuna salad.  Or you can do like the much-admired Mile End Deli folks and try a contrarian recipe with no mayo and pickled asparagus.

This brings us to the topic of dissection. I’ve found that a lot of folks are intimidated by a humble smoked whitefish.  They’re not sure how to get the meat out.  It may also look, to the unaccustomed eye, like something that washed up at low tide and then got left in the sun.  The whole fish can also be hard to find, though vacuum-packed, center-cut pieces are often stocked in my local supers, and are perfectly fine, as-is or in salads.

So find some nice fish somewhere, prepare yourself to look it in the eye before breakfast, strip off the skin, pry up the meat, and go. Below are some instructions for doing just that, and for a classic deli salad version with sour cream that helps mitigate the natural oiliness of the fish.  This is as simple as it gets – no glamour, just good.

Smoked Whitefish Salad

Here’s how to dissect your own whitefish, for bagel chunks or salads.

I had the Ultimate Italian sandwich at Moody’s Delicatessen in Waltham, MA a few years ago.  Joshua Smith, their resident deli genius, had inserted rings of Mama Lil’s original pickled goat horn peppers in  place of the usual flabby, citric slabs of red roasted nothingness in between the cheese and the bread.  It was an act of true connoisseurship.

I had never heard of Mama Lil.  Her peppers were prominently marked as coming from Oregon, as if Portland were some kind of Pickled Pepper Athens.  I had two competing visions of her, and they both involved head scarves.  In one she was a kind of zaftig earth mother, overseeing a crew of vagabond ex-hippie pepper pluckers in a humid, hidden valley on the Pacific coast. In the other, she was a European grandma.  I took home a really expensive jar of her peppers from Moody’s refrigerated case and ate all of them without wondering too hard how they were made.  I figured I’d run into them again.

Which I did, but it took years.  Partly because I never went back to Moody’s.  My musician friend from Waltham moved to Nashville, and the hand surgeon I was seeing there fixed up my trigger finger, and Waltham is otherwise kind of a pain to get to.  So imagine my delight when I ran into Mama Lil again.  Her peppers were tucked into the crowded aisles of a market in lovely Woodstock, Vermont; a  town pumped so full of Rockefeller money that they could apparently afford to buy them in bulk, and repackage them.

I was more careful, this time.  I wanted those peppers, and I didn’t want to order them in glass jars, from Amazon.  I tasted the pickling liquid.  It was not too acid, and very sweet.  There was also a mysterious, bushy, licorice scent to the liquor that made the peppers seem a bit exotic and spicy, rather than just sweet and hot.

The bleached-out seeds that speckled the dregs looked like fennel to me, though I compared them to dill and cumin, just to be sure.  I created a tentative recipe, lowering my typical brine formula to just 4% salt, and using twice as much sugar as usual.  Mama Lil’s slices still had more sweetness in the flesh, but I tabled work on that feature while I ate the initial results.   Which were pretty spectacular, especially on sandwiches.

So what is a goat horn pepper?  The interwebs, as randomly unreliable as ever, suggest that the goat horn is a variety of cayenne.  But Mama Lil’s peppers looked shorter and thicker, like Hungarian wax peppers, only ripened to a fulsome, lipstick red instead of their usual pale yellow-green.  Either way, I wouldn’t find any near me.  But a couple of supermarket trips later, cello packs of  peppers winsomely labeled Li’l Hotties appeared.  They were a stoplight blend of red and green jalapenos and small, hot yellowish wax peppers, and I immediately thought – nice cheap Christmas presents.

Meanwhile, although Mama’s own home site was pretty coy about the original recipe, her resellers were as gabby as proud uncles.  Mama Lil was from Abruzzi, her grandson makes the peppers, and the secret ingredients include fennel seed, garlic and maple syrup.  I kicked myself for having missed the central Italian maple sugar season, but I did have some fresh bottles from the last one in Vermont.  That, and the garlic, and the Li’l Hotties, do make a spectacular hot-sweet pickled pepper.  You should be so lucky as to be on my cheap Christmas present list, but you can stock up for one of your own.

Papa’s Pickled Peppers

A very stoned friend of my son’s came over one night and ate enough of my leftover potato salad to feed three or four.  He viewed it as such an iconic dish that finishing it off was a kind of patriotic act, like standing up for the national anthem at a ball game.

He might not have felt the same way if he were a southerner.  There are folks just a plane hop away who make potato salad with flaky russets instead of waxy new potatoes, and consider the dish incomplete without a little pickle juice.  If a stoner from there ate a potato salad made with whole, skin-on slices they might need rehab treatments involving grits and pimento cheese.

Now that it’s close to Thanksgiving, I recall that there are quiz sites – like this one on BuzzFeed – where you can tick off what you’ll be eating, and they’ll magically predict the state you’ll be eating it in.   The political stat geek site FiveThirtyEight even has a downloadable breakdown of regional dishes.  In all of these, turkey is the common denominator – you are what you eat on the side, apparently.

Your classic deli potato salad is made of nothing but cubed peeled russets and dressing, served in a perfect, paprika-dusted half dome next to a sandwich on a thick china plate, with a sprig of curly parsley.  You can sub Idaho spuds in the recipe below, but I do think that waxy new potatoes, with their scrubbed, mineral-rich skins, are much more interesting.  It could be a New England thing – this is the land of brown eggs and red potatoes – or you could just call this a deluxe version.

The secret to all of these mayo-based salads is to not leave the dressing proportions to chance.  Do it up ahead of time using this insanely overstuffed recipe and dress it just before serving,making it as moist or as dry as you like.  If you do prep it beforehand or have leftovers, drain out any liquid and give it an extra toss with a bit more dressing.  Commercial premixed salads have a scary long shelf life, but rarely taste completely fresh.  Yours will.

To complete the holy trinity of sandwich, salad and slaw, I’m also including a simple cole slaw recipe.  Eaters, if you keep some of that dressing on hand, you can grab a bag of premixed shredded cabbage and carrots and give your sandwiches the companionship they deserve, in mere minutes.  Or just get stoned and eat it over the sink.

Deli Style Red Potato Salad

 

Deli Style Cole Slaw

I wouldn’t have thought very young children would like dill pickles until I gave one to my daughter.  She was around one at the time, and liked to careen around the kitchen in her walker, hunting for bananas.  I didn’t have any fruit handy so I gave her a nice pickle, probably a kosher half-sour.  She instantly put it in her mouth and kept it there as if it were a big green binky.

Several minutes later, I was getting a little concerned.  The child was just sitting there with the pickle in her mouth and a look of glazed wonder on her chubby little face.  I thought perhaps it wasn’t really good for her, especially as she barely had any teeth, so I removed the pickle with some difficulty.  I saw she had pierced its green skin with her two sharp little incisors and had been busily sucking out all the juice, like a little blonde pickle vampire.

To a child used to strained peas, that briny juice must have been the taste equivalent of Disney World.  I wish I could still experience food that way myself, but it’s probably too late.  Or at least it takes more, these days, than a fermented cucumber, though pickles are still a wonderful thing to have around the house, easy to make, and take almost no time at all.

To be sure, Eaters, I generally make plain pickled pickles, as opposed to fermented pickles.  The difference is that true fermentation means some sort of bacteria have been whaling away at your vegetation, producing acid and gasses as a by-product.  This invariably takes at least a few days if not weeks, and results in a sourness that is, ideally, both pleasant and complex.  But you can pickle things just using vinegar as your acid, and stick them right in the fridge.

I freely admit that refrigerator pickles don’t have the echt gestalt of the basement crock variety, but they’re not only good because they’re easy to make.  Unfermented pickles are crisp and refreshing, and taste more like the original vegetable.  They go well with salads and other cold foods.  You can flavor them endlessly, and you can’t really buy them.  They have to be yours.

Luckily, you can have your very own pickles in less than an hour from now, shopping time included.  And you don’t even really need a recipe.  You just need a measuring cup, a scale, and a tiny bit of math.

 

 

Fridge Pickles

My mall food court life lasted a few short years, but I learned a lot.  One thing I learned is that the Chinese place will outsell everyone, with Mexican pretty close behind, especially in Los Angeles.  Seafood and barbecue, which were my own specialties, lagged a bit, which gave me lots of time for abstract thoughts.

What, for example, makes Chinese food so incredibly popular?  If you think of your everyday, everywhere Chinese restaurants as outposts of a single giant franchise – which they pretty much are, the menus and recipes all being more or less the same – there are way more Chinese restaurants in the US than all the Burger Kings, Mickey Ds, and KFCs combined.

I adore Chinese food, and I get that even a really ordinary General Tsao chicken is more appealing than grilled fish most days, but why is that, exactly?  Why, in other words, did Panda Express kick my butt so very, very hard?

I believe it’s because Chinese food, among all the great cuisines of the world, most successfully blends each of the three major fast food groups – sugar, salt and fat – in a single dish.

Let’s think about this.  If you can combine sugar, salt and fat in a single deliverable food unit, you’ve got a winner – especially if you can fold in a bit of crunch.  Most popular western foods manage just two of the three.  Combining fat and salt gives you fried chicken and french fries.  For salt and sugar, you’ve got barbecued potato chips.  Fat and sugar get you ice cream and every kind of pie.

Your classic fast food hamburgers and hot dogs might sneak in there, once you add the ketchup, relish, and a sugar-infused bun.  I’m sure that’s why the combo is so popular.  But sweet and sour pork?  Triple crown, hands down.

There are a few things in the deli world that might pass muster (or mustard):  reuben sandwiches, with their sweet spread of dressing contrasting with the salty, crunchy sauerkraut and fatty corned beef and cheese.  Barbecued short ribs.  But what about the sides – specifically the cole slaw and potato salad?

Eaters, the secret to deli-type slaw and potato salad is that they contain way more sugar and salt than you would ever have the nerve to add at home, particularly if people are watching. But together, we can fix this.  Just get everyone else out of the room and follow these simple recipes.

Deli-style dressing for cole slaw, macaroni and potato salads.

It is never a good idea for me to open Bon Appetit or its ilk in May or June because I get discomposed by all the beautiful salad photos.  Who are these people that eat cantaloupe with sugar snap peas and ricotto salata?  And why did I let that recipe, with its gorgeous array of painfully frenched pea pods and sprinkle of Aleppo-style pepper,  spoil the pride I felt in finally discovering a valid use for butternut squash noodles?

More particularly, why do so many of my recipes look like they were inspired by Al Davis (the NFL owner whose motto was “Just Win, Baby”) as opposed to, say, Brillat-Savarin?  Is it not possible to combine things that taste great together and still come in lovely contrasting colors?

Maybe sometimes, but not for this salad, whose personal motto is “Win Ugly.” My big insight here – the hole that I found between the guard and tackle – was to sprinkle the mock pasta noodles with chili powder and a bit of olive oil, then grill them until tender.  When they came off the grill, glistening and shrunk down to a caramelized tangle about half the size they started with, they were crying out for unification with the steak tips on the other side of the barbecue.

But I had to have an interesting salad.  Because I was not just hungry.  I was jealous.

So I tossed the ersatz noodles, while they were still warm, with toasted pecans and a nubbleized chunk of clover blossom honey goat cheese I had just bought out of whimsy and curiosity (why did goat farmers in Vermont make a point of buying honey from North Dakota?), which turned out to be exactly complementary.  Also some sliced peppadews, for spice.  And since the noodles were still warm enough to be slick with their olive oil marinade, a little balsamic vinegar was the only dressing required.

But did it need that final, whimsical sprinkle of pepper flakes?  Only on my plate, because I’m jaded.  And Bon Appetit is right, of course, true Syrian Aleppo peppers haven’t been available for years, but you can still get a perfect substitute that Burlap and Barrel sells as Silk Chili, or get Urfa Biber peppers from the next mountain over in Turkey, from The Spice House or many other sources.

Grilled Butternut Squash Salad with Honey Goat Cheese, Peppadews and Pecans

It’s great to have this blog as an excuse to make things I’ve been thinking about for awhile.  My family doesn’t actually complain about the amount of cured salmon we have kicking around, but I’m apt to get comments like, “Why don’t you just make it normal if you’re not sure how it will come out?”

Because I can’t stand not knowing.  Because it’s there in my head.  And because, as Picasso once replied when a reporter asked him how many toes he would draw on a foot if he was trying make it the way it appears in real life, “I don’t know.  There are no toes in real life.”

There is, of course, plenty of soy-cured salmon in real life.  But in most recipes,  the fish is immersed in soy-flavored broth and therefore plumped up rather than dried out.   So this, really, is a gravlax flavored with soy and ginger instead of rye whiskey, tequila or aquavit – my usual jam – and it’s been fun to have around.

The first batch went into a rice bowl.  The second wound up, unexpectedly, as sushi.  A bit of this third batch became a very simple Japanese-Peruvian tiradito (which is itself a mashup; the love child of sashimi and ceviche).  We also wound up with a terrific bowl of Japanese-style potato salad with cubes of cured salmon.

So, misnamed or not, this Soy and Ginger Gravlax is pretty versatile – it has plenty of toes, so to speak – as well as easy to make.  It needs no turning, weighing is optional, and it can be ready in as little as a day.

Soy and Ginger Gravlax

 

This Wild Rice Bowl with Soy-Cured Salmon and Clementine Miso Dressing, made with cubes of home-cured salmon, combines nutty-tasting wild rice, sweet roasted beet cubes, crispy fried dulse and our/your favorite garnishes du jour (meaning whatever is in the fridge, but the avocado was particularly nice).  We drizzled it with a smooth but tangy miso-based dressing.

Wild Rice Bowl with Soy-Cured Salmon and Clementine Miso Dressing

If you want to preserve fish without refrigeration, you have to get the water out of it.  The classic way to do this is with salt.  Cover fresh fish with salt and it will quickly lose between 10% and 20% of its moisture, maybe even a bit more – enough so you can air dry it in cool weather without it spoiling.   In a few weeks, you’ll have something you can safely pack in a barrel and send off with Vikings.  You could also smoke it, which lays on an extra anti-bacterial layer, and tastes good.

But can you also just brine it?  No, not really.  Fish sitting in a salty brine will get saltier, for sure, but it will also gain, not lose moisture, swelling up by between 5% and 10%, by weight.  The salt or vinegar in the brine will keep fish from spoiling so long as it is actually sitting in liquid, but once you take it out, the bacterial clock starts ticking and you’ll need to cook and eat it, or find some other way to preserve it.  Either way, the main purpose of brine today is to make your food saltier, ergo tastier – depending on the spices and the salt.

Which brings us to sodium nitrate, or its breakdown product, sodium nitrite.  Eaters, sodium nitrite is amazing stuff.  I know it’s controversial.  I know you have to order it by mail.  I know they color it pink so you don’t mistake it for regular salt, eat too much of it, and die.  I don’t care.  I love it anyway.   I’m going to put it in recipes.  But here, for just this one time, are the pros and cons, so you can have them and make your own decisions.

Nitrite Pros

• Just a small amount has a disproportionately delicious effect on food, in terms of texture, taste and appearance.
• Your body already has a ton of sodium nitrite in it, nearly all of it from certain vegetables like celery and beets.

Nitrite Cons

• There are studies showing an increased risk of cancer associated with chemical nitrite, as opposed to nitrite that occurs naturally.

That’s it – reams of articles absorbed and distilled for you in just three lines.  So.  It’s cool if you don’t want to use pink salt.   Just substitute regular salt instead, maybe adding a bit extra – all pink salt #1 cure, regardless of brand or source, is 6.25% sodium nitrite.  The rest is regular salt, a little pink dye, and maybe some anticoagulant.

I have personally decided that I would rather fight cancer on other dietary fronts, as well as with exercise and plenty of good sleep.  So I am going to tell you how to work with this stuff.

First of all, sodium nitrite seems to have dozens of names – Pink Salt, Cure #1, Prague Powder, Instacure and a slew of brand names that tell you nothing.  What you want is the above-mentioned mix of 6.25% sodium nitrite.  The brand I buy is Hoosier Hill Farm Prague #1 Powder Curing Salt.  I’m sure you can get the same stuff cheaper.  I buy it because I’ve always bought it.

Products labelled Cure #2, and some branded cure names, use sodium nitrate instead of sodium nitrite, or a mix of the two.  You probably don’t want that, as it’s not meant to be ingested directly. Sodium nitrate is mainly used in meats that cure for weeks, not days, like sausages and salami.  The extra time lets the nitrate break down slowly into nitrite, protecting the meat as it self-destructs.  I didn’t have to stock Cure #2 until I got on my current soppressata kick.

You might figure that since there’s a lot of nitrite in celery, etc., that maybe you can just use celery puree and regular salt to make a nitrite cure.  I have been out there ahead of you and it doesn’t work.  Plus the celery-flavored salmon I created, while not actually unpleasant, was weird.  There are some other celery-derived products, like extracts and powders, that purportedly do have enough nitrite in them to make up a substitute – you often see them listed on product labels that also feature the word “uncured,” in boldface.  But how do you know if the extracting process preserves the apparent harmlessness of the nitrites in the celery stalk itself?

It’s actually a bit unusual to put sodium nitrite in a brine for fish.  You typically run into it for pork products or for corned beef, where it’s amazing how a few grams of pink salt in several quarts of water will turn the meat red, and change the texture.  But I found it made a real difference in kippered, baked salmon.  And I’m still playing around, but I left it out of my other recipes here, for finnan haddie and for this semi-famous pickled salmon appetizer from a Montreal steakhouse.

Pink salt cure #1, when called out directly in recipes, is normally only a very small part of the overall added salt.  For experimentation, it’s good to have a premixed formula like the Basic Dry Cure, which I lifted unaltered from Ruhlman and Polcyn’s ubiquitous Charcuterie.  In this mix, the pink salt is only 12.44% of the overall salt, meaning the nitrite itself is only about 0.8%.  The Basic Dry Cure is handy stuff to have around – it can be used directly as is to make bacon or tasso ham, for example, or added in place of a given salt quantity to judge the effect of a true nitrite cure.

The main thing to think about when playing with brine is the overall strength, as a percentage of salt.  I take a 5% brine as my standard strength, figuring that fish live in the sea, which is around 3.5% salt, and so you if you want them to taste seasoned they need a little bit more than that.  How’s that for science?  But you will seriously find 5% or 6% as a general standard.  This is a snap to work with in the metric system.  A 5% brine is 50 grams of salt per liter (1000 ml, which is also 1000 grams) of water, which in our awkward world works out to about 12 grams of salt per cup.

By some mystical circumstance, 12 grams of salt is about one generous tablespoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, which is my kitchen standard.  It’s also the least salty salt around, because many of the crystals are hollow – you can actually crinkle it onto food, where its natural cragginess helps it stick to smooth surfaces.  These same characteristics also make it the lightest commercial table salt, at just 10 g per level tablespoon.  Morton’s coarse kosher salt, their great competitor and also a fine product, weighs in at 17 grams per tablespoon, which is the typical quoted standard.

This, of course, got me curious.  Looking for yet more extreme examples, I hunted around in my nether pantry (exotic salt is a go-to gift for Poppa Larry) and rediscovered both a lovely Tunisian fleur de sel with giant hollow crystals that weighed just 9 grams per tablespoon, and a fine sea salt that weighed exactly double that for the same volume.  So there you go – when it counts, weigh your salt.  And if you’re like me, check the back shelves of your pantry now and then.

Here are a few favorite brined fish recipes.  I think you’ll find this Baked Kippered Salmon rivals anything you can find in a deli.  The curing process – plus a slow oven and a watchful eye on the thermometer – give it a melting tenderness that makes it rival even the best lox as a bagel topping.  It’s also perfect on salads, or flaked into a creamy pasta dish.

Baked Kippered Salmon

 

Moishe’s Pickled Salmon Appetizer is a culinary time warp – you can eat it in the back seat of your DeLorean.  I much prefer it to the typical clear deli versions, which for me don’t work well with salmon.  The Heinz chili sauce is just right in this context.  Overall, this is the kind of dish I could feed to a Canadian uncle, who would then say, “they charge you a fortune for this at Moishe’s.”

Moishe’s Pickled Salmon Appetizer

 

Finnan Haddie is a lovely product to work with – it has deep ocean flavor, a smoky firmness, freezes beautifully, and can mate up with anything from a stuffed baked potato to chowders both creamy and brothy.  It’s also part of a classic Scottish breakfast, either poached or fried up with bacon.

Finnan Haddie