Fishing for compliments

The season and the arrival of guests call for a grand dish that celebrates centuries of preserving fish: gravlax. Plus: what I've been drinking this week

NB I’m taking a break for Christmas next week - back on 1 January 2025!

Christmas is coming: my gravlax's stages of production, from raw fillet to slices of fishy deliciousness

While I’ve previously written of my dislike of turkey, I’m not down on all Christmas fare – far from it. I resolutely eat Christmas pudding with the big meal, despite my kids’ disdain for it. I have ordered an implausibly large ham and will boil, glaze and roast it for the family on Boxing Day. And one of my favourite rituals of the season is making gravlax. A side of salmon cured this way is a dish to impress. But in fact it’s easy – and a lot cheaper than buying it made.

More than that, I like the way that gravlax recalls the seasonal rhythms of a time when food preservation was a vital part of surviving winter. In medieval Scandinavia, fishermen preserved salmon by salting it and burying it in the sand above a beach’s high-tide line to ferment (gravlax – or gravadlax – means “grave salmon”.) Burying food to ferment in this way is common across many cultures with cold winters. Indeed burying salmon on the beach seems less outlandish than the traditional Greenland delicacy kiviak, where whole seagulls and auks are sewn into the abdominal cavity of a disembowelled seal and left under a flat rock to ferment for several months. In his pickling bible, The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz quotes one report of the dish which notes that “It tastes like a matured cheese and very pungent.” I bet it does.

While the gravlax method involves some fermentation, the process of curing fish with salt is similar to that used traditionally in smoking fish such as salmon and herring. Most smoked fish is salted or brined first before smoking: both salting and smoking stabilise the flesh by collapsing protein molecules into forms that are harder for bacteria and enzymes to attack and spoil. And indeed you can see how much water the salt draws out of the fish in the large quantity of slightly gunky brine that you’ll need to tip out of the dish you cure your gravlax in.

Curing doesn’t keep the fish for long – up to a couple of weeks, wrapped in baking parchment and kept in the fridge. But with modern technology, as with smoking fish, the preservation technique is no longer the point anyway. This is about taste: the salt and slight fermentation give the fish added depth of flavour, combined with the essential addition of dill.

As for the fish itself, it's debatable whether it’s more sustainable to use farmed or wild salmon. Eating farmed salmon might put less pressure on wild fish stocks, but the salmon farming industry is polluting and the fish are fed on fishmeal, itself made from processed small fish. A better option is salmon from RSPCA-approved producers, who must keep fewer fish in their pens to give them more space to swim, and have stricter health checks. Salmon certified as organic are raised with similar stricter welfare standards, and in addition organic standards ban the use of the antibiotics and growth hormones that some producers use.

And what to drink with it? It being Christmas, we’ll be drinking champagne with my gravlax, though a more Scandinavian accompaniment would be hard liquor – perhaps the same kind as is optional in your cure. I used Icelandic Brennivín, a grain liquor flavoured with caraway, because I happened to have a years-old bottle lurking at the back of our drinks cupboard – but I think knocking that back with gravlax would be quite hard core. Camilla Plum concludes the recipe in her classic book, The Scandinavian Kitchen, “you will also need a small rocky Swedish island, a keg of beer and a bottle of schnapps.” That sounds lovely, but in south London, a fire and glasses of champagne will do just fine.

Gravlax

These quantities are for 1kg of salmon, which is the average-sized side sold by British supermarkets, though the side I used, pictured above, was 1.5kg. If your salmon hasn’t already been frozen, then freezing it for 24 hours before you prepare it will kill any parasites.

1 side of salmon

75g flaky sea salt (eg Maldon)

75g caster sugar

A good grind of black pepper

100g dill, stalks and fronds, chopped

2 tbsp gin, vodka or aquavit (optional)

Dill and mustard sauce, to serve

2 tbsp Dijon mustard

2 tbsp light brown sugar

2 tbsp cider or white wine vinegar

2 tbsp vegetable oil

20g dill, fronds only, finely chopped

First mix your cure in a bowl – the salt, sugar, pepper, dill and liquor if you’re using.

Put the salmon skin side down on a cutting board and cut it in half across, so that you have two pieces of equal length. Run your fingertips down the lower side of the fillet to check for any remaining pin bones, and pull them out with tweezers if you find any. Most recipes say to trim the narrow bit of the tail but that seems a waste and a faff to me. Carefully spread your cure all over the flesh of one piece of salmon. Then put the other half of salmon flesh-down on top of the cure, so that you have a salmon sandwich with dill in the middle.

Now take a roll of clingfilm: tear off a big length. Put the salmon down on it and wrap it up. Put the salmon package in a baking dish or similar. Then put a small cutting board or strip of wood on top of the salmon, weight it down (with clean pebbles, kitchen weights, a spurious political autobiography etc) and put it in the fridge.

How long you leave it cure is partly a question of taste: it will get saltier the longer you leave it, and I would say curing a 1kg side of salmon for four days, as some recipes suggest, might give you quite a salty gravlax. I cure mine for two days. After a night or 12 hours curing, take it out of the fridge, tip away the brine, turn the fish package over (this process is a bit sticky and messy) and return to the fridge with the weights. Do this twice more at 12-hour intervals.

After 48 hours, unwrap your salmon. You will need to brush all the cure off – I rinse it lightly too. There will still be some bits of dill sticking to the fish, which is fine. Dry the salmon with paper towels. You are now ready to slice it. Put it skin side down on a cutting board. Using a sharp chef’s knife, slice the fish at a 45 degree angle or even a bit shallower, cutting down to the skin and then gently angling the knife to separate the slice from the skin. Continue cutting thin slices – or thicker, if you prefer – until you’ve either finished the fish or have as much as you need; if you do have a section of fish left, tightly wrap it in baking parchment and put it in the fridge to finish later.

To make the sauce, mix together the mustard, sugar and vinegar. Add a pinch of salt and whisk in the oil. You want a smooth, fairly runny consistency. Then mix in the dill.

Now pour yourself a glass of champagne, if you haven’t already, and carry your platter of gravlax and sauce to your oohing guests.

Means of production: the Liz Truss book was a gag gift from a friend with a twisted sense of humour, honest (I did use weights too)

What I’ve been drinking this week

Hunter’s “Offshoot” Chardonnay 2021, Marlborough - this is serious-quality New Zealand Chardonnay. There’s some oak but used judiciously, and lovely richness from being aged in its lees; crisp, sweet fruit, nice texture, beautiful balance. Hard to think where else in the world you’d find Chardonnay of quite this kind of class at this price (The Wine Society, £19.50.)

Villa Tinta Odessa Black 2019, Ukraine - it’s a shame that it has taken war to bring Ukraine’s wines to our attention but they’re worth checking out. Odessa Black is a local red grape: this brims with dark, blackcurrant fruit and dark-chocolatey notes. Demands red meat, I think. Wines of Ukraine has launched a “Just One Bottle” campaign this month to encourage people to buy at least one bottle of Ukrainian wine during the country’s ordeal: I heartily endorse that (Theatre of Wine, Cellar Door Wines and elsewhere, from £16.50.)

Château Kefraya red 2007, Bekaa Valley - I had lunch last week with my old Evening Standard comrade Charlotte at Ranoush Juice, the Lebanese joint opposite the paper’s old headquarters, where years ago, over hummus shawarma and tabbouleh, we used to plot our escape from “Lord” Lebedev’s rag. I love the Kefraya wines, and god knows Lebanon’s winemakers deserve all the help they can get right now. But imagine my surprise when we ordered glasses of this, and the waiter poured from an open bottle of the 2007 vintage. It must have been hanging around in their racks for years, because Wine-Searcher.com says it’s unavailable now even in Lebanon. Trademark herby, garrigue notes, savoury and mellow, still fresh: an unexpected treat (VINUM has the 2012, £36.55; Lebanese Fine Wines has the 2017, £29.)