Just a little twist on the Salmon gravlax I have featured on this blog before… but this one elicited a lot of favorable comments over the holiday season.
Amazing what a bit of color will do to get rave reviews. The gravlax recipe I typically use is posted here.
This version adds about a pound of two of fresh young beets, peeled, washed and blitzed in a food processor and added to the other ingredients in the original gravlax recipe. I also added say two tablespoons of vodka to this version, and its impact is subtle but delicious.
Sugar, salt, white peppercorns, juniper berries, lots of dill, vodka at the ready.
Blitzed beets.
Salmon fillets coated in the curing mixture…
…and buried in beets.
The resulting gravlax had a distinctive red outer skin that looked unusual and quite attractive when sliced. Oh, and a Marketman tip for you… if slicing gravlax, it’s best to freeze it a bit as you can slice it thiner and more uniformly that way… not frozen all the way through, but semi-frozen. Works like a dream every time. If you store your finished gravlax in the freezer, just defrost it for say a couple of hours in the fridge, before slicing while it is still semi-frozen.
2 Responses
Does the beet add flavor to the gravlax or just colors the outside?
ami, I think the primary impact is color, rather than a flavor infusion… with sugar and salt in the cure, it tends to overwhelm other subtle flavors… but the juniper berries and vodka are faintly discernible…