Title: Smoked Salmon
Categories: Info, Kooknet
Yield: 1 Info
Smoked salmon can be traced back to 1,000 B.C. In the United states,
it goes back to the turn of the century -- to Brooklyn and Queens,
birthplace of the New York deli. For centuries seafood was smoked for
the purpose of preservation; today it's smoked almost exclusively for
flavor.
Actually, smoking does very little to preserve seafood; it's the
brining that precedes it that prolongs shelf life. For example, the
beloved lox of the New York deli trade never saw smoke until the
1940s. Other fish, carp, trout, and sturgeon, were smoked, but not
salmon. Traditional lox, usually king salmon from the Pacific
Northwest, was salted in barrels for up to a year and shipped by
train from Seattle to New York. Rinsed in fresh water, it was ready
to eat. Sugar was added to the brine to help mask the salt.
The difference between lox and nova is salt. Nova has much less of it;
i.e., nova is a milder cure. Nova is also traditionally made from
Atlantic salmon from Nova Scotia, hence nova.
While there's still a hankering for lox among older-generation Jews
who grew up on it in the big cities, the market is now almost
entirely for milder nova -- so much so that the distinction has been
all but lost. Lox has come to mean almost any mild-cured salmon.
The smoked seafood business received a boost a few years ago when the
FDA dropped a 5% minimum salt requirement for preservation, enabling
smokers to produce milder products more in keeping with the tastes of
the times. This opened the door to a host of new smoked products
which are lower in salt and often a great value because of the lower
cost of raw material compared to the best salmon.
There are two kinds of smoked seafood; hot-smoked and cold-smoked. A
hot-smoked product is cooked and a cold-smoked product isn't.
Talking Smoked -- A Guide to the Lingo
Cold-Smoked: a smoked product that isn't cooked, i.e., one that
smoked to an internal temperature no higher than 85 F.
Hot-Smoked: temperatures vary from smoker to smoker, but generally the
internal temperature of hot-smoked products reaches 140 F or more.
Curing: a preservation method that can involve any combination of
smoking, salting, drying, fermenting or acid curing.
Mild Cure: a term applied mainly to salmon, mild cure means low salt
content.
Hard-Smoked: a smoked product that is heavily salted and low in
moisture for a longer shelf life. Indian cured salmon (sometimes
called "squaw candy") is hard-smoked; another example is salmon jerky.
Kippered: in the U.K., kippered refers to a product; cold-smoked
herring (called "kippers"). In the U.S., kippered refers to the
process of hot-smoking. It can be applied to any number of species
that have been hot-smoked.
Lox: the word "lox" is a Yiddush corruption of the German word lachs
for salmon. Traditionally it is salmon that is salted and held in
barrels for up to a year before being rinsed in fresh water and
marketed. More recently, lox refers to any mild-cured smoked salmon.
Simply Seafood Fall 1994 Posted by Michael Prothro KOOK-NET
: Mike's Resort BBS, Fayetteville, AR, (501)521-8920
