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Dried or Smoked Salmon

A method of preserving salmon by salting, drying, and smoking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and salmon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,078 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Dried or Smoked Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the fish down the back, remove the entrails and roe, and scale it.

  2. Rub the outside and inside of the fish with coarse sea salt.

  3. Hang the fish to drain for 24 hours.

Cure

  1. Pound together the saltpetre, coarse sea salt, and coarse brown sugar.

  2. Rub the mixture over the salmon.

  3. Place the salmon on a large dish for 2 days.

  4. Rub the salmon again with coarse sea salt.

  5. Wipe the salmon well.

Smoke

  1. Stretch the salmon open with two sticks.

  2. Hang the salmon in a chimney with a smothered wood fire, in a smokehouse, or in a dry, cool place.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Fish + salmontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Salmon + sugartop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together931 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Fish + sugartop 42% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Salmon
The main item; its flesh is firmed and flavoured by the cure and smoke.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the fish and gives the flesh its characteristic pink colour during curing.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the flesh, firming its texture during curing.
Coarse brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the salt in the cure.

The step that matters

Rubbing the cure over the salmon and resting it for 2 days. The cure must cover the flesh evenly. Salt and sugar draw water out of the fish and dissolve into it, firming the texture and preserving it. Uneven coverage leaves spoiling-prone spots.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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