Smoked Salmon recipes
Smoked salmon is a popular holiday treat and delicious addition to breakfasts and parties. Smoked salmon is often mislabeled as gravlax (unsmoked, wet-cured salmon) or lox (unsmoked, wet-cured salmon). It is either farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo Salar) or one of the five wild Pacific salmon species (chum and coho, pink and sockeye or Chinook), which are cured with salt and sugar and then cold-smoked at a temperature below 80 degrees F. Cold smoking is not like hot smoking. The fish isn’t cooked, resulting in the delicate, silky texture we associate with smoked salmon.
Which brand should you buy? We tasted the top-selling cold-smoked salmons from mail order and decided which brand to buy. We wanted a succulent, smoky, but not too salty, smoked salmon that would be delicious to serve at holiday parties.
Scotch-cured, smoked Scottish salmon from Browne Trading Company ($23 per 8 oz., cut; $45 per 1 lb.) is farmed Atlantic salmon that has been Scotch whisky-cured and smoked over Maine fruitwoods. It was a nice combination of sweet and salty flavours. The texture was similar to raw salmon, which many tasters appreciated.
Russ & Daughters Gaspe Nova ($30 lb., sliced) was incredibly smooth, rich, and had a salty kick but a gentle smoke finish. This salmon is from Quebec’s Gaspe Bay, Canada. Nova is the Nova nomenclature of smoked Atlantic salmon that was caught in Nova Scotia. This style of smoked salmon can also be wet-cured in brine and would make a great topping for canapes or as a rich partner for crackers like crème fraiche, capers, and capers.
Tracklements Original Highland Smoked Salmon is made from fish caught in the Bay of Fundy near Nova Scotia. The salmon was oily in appearance, but the perfect balance of sweetness, smoke, and salt was achieved by brown sugar, salt, and hardwood smoking. Tracklements salmon is not sliced for you to preserve freshness and quality. Be sure to have a sharp knife ready to slice thin slices.
Taku Wild Alaska Seafood was the wild Pacific salmon we loved ($61 per 1-1/2 lb., sliced). Some people were surprised by the intense red colour of the sockeye salmon, but we loved its fresh taste. The naturally dense salmon was mildly smoky, with a mild flavour. However, it had a more delicate texture than the farmed varieties. We felt great knowing that we were eating wild products.
The rare and delicious white smoked salmon is a great treat. These fish are the same Atlantic species as pink-coloured salmon and live on a diet devoid of shrimp and krill in the Baltic Sea. They give their pink hues to the fish they eat.
