The Raw Truth About Lox

Is That an Impostor Perched So Pinkly on Your Brunch Bagel?

These days, sales of lox — salmon long-cured in a salt brine — compared to smoked salmon are astonishingly low. Mark Russ Federman, the owner of Russ & Daughters, New York’s premier appetizing store, estimates that lox accounts for only 15% to 20% of his salmon sales, which is actually a far higher number than it is at most retail outlets. This is attested to by the smokehouses that process and sell cured salmon to supermarkets and bagel stores around the country. At Banner Smoked Fish of Coney Island, for instance, lox sales total only about 5% of those for smoked salmon. At Acme Smoked Fish in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the largest smoked-fish house in the continental United States, the percentage is lower still; on average, Acme sells some 25,000 to 30,000 pounds of smoked salmon a week, while sales of lox might not exceed 1,000 pounds.

The reason for this, quite simply, is changing American tastes. “It’s not just lox,” Avi Attias, the owner of Banner Smoked Fish, told the Forward. “Everything that’s salty is going down.” The smoked-fish trade is rife with stories of customers who order a shipment of “lox” and then, having received it, send it back, complaining that it’s too salty. This is why smokehouses will commonly double-check a lox order, making sure that the customer really means lox, rather than the milder-tasting smoked salmon. As the saying that is widespread in the business has it, “You can’t get lox without a note from your mother.”

Lox and smoked salmon are both examples of what is known as cured fish. “Curing” a fish — like curing meat or cheese or any other foodstuff — means to treat it for the purposes of preservation. This can be done by any one of several methods (or a combination of methods), including pickling, smoking and salting. In salt curing, the fish is packed in salt or, alternatively, submerged in a salty brine. The salt kills potentially harmful bacteria and also absorbs the moisture in which bacteria grow, resulting in a product that can be safely preserved for long periods of time without refrigeration. In smoke curing, the fish is subjected to several hours of wood smoke, which deposits tarry substances on the surface of the fish. Like salting, the smoking process kills bacteria while also creating an impermeable seal on the fish that reduces exposure to air, which can cause rancidity in fats. This is especially useful for fattier foods (bacon, for instance, or oily fish such as herring), but as a rule smoking is a less efficient preservation technique and is usually performed in conjunction with another curing method.

Water, salt, wood, fire: The ingredients for curing fish are as elemental as the earth and the process nearly as old as civilization. Salted fish, notes Mark Kurlansky in “Salt: A World History” (Walker, 2002), have been found in Egyptian tombs dating to before 2000 BCE, while halfway around the world, Chinese records from the second millennium BCE also describe the preservation of fish in salt. In Europe, the earliest preserving was done with smoke; the remains of a fish-smoking station found along the River Bann in Ireland date to just about the same period — 2000 BCE — some 1,500 years before the salting of fish began to appear in Western Europe.

Exactly when Jews first began to cure fish is not known for certain; the place of origin was likely medieval Germany, where the curing of fish had long been practiced. With the eastward migration of the late Middle Ages, the Jews carried their techniques for smoking and salting fish to Eastern Europe. There, as elsewhere around the world, Jews were prodigious fish-eaters. Fish is considered pareve and so can be eaten with either meat or dairy products; smoked and salted fish was especially popular, because it was not cooked and thus, said the rabbis, permissible to eat even if prepared by non-Jews. (Salmon, by the way, was far too expensive for most Eastern European Jews; herring and carp were the staple fish.) The late 19th century brought the mass immigration from Eastern Europe, and Jews began to establish fish-smoking establishments in the West, including in London — the illustrious smokehouse H. Foreman & Son, for example, founded in 1905 by a Russian-Jewish immigrant and still operating in the East End — and especially in New York. The original New York smokers had been German, but by the end of World War I the business had become, for all intents and purposes, a Jewish one.

Herring continued to be extremely popular among Jews in the New World (at least for another generation or two), but now it was supplemented by salmon, which in the United States was comparatively cheap and plentiful. In those days all salmon were caught in the wild and then shipped from the place of capture by train. Refrigeration, of course, had not yet been invented, and so the salmon were packed in salt to preserve them during the long train ride. This heavily salted salmon — known in Yiddish as lox, from the German word for salmon, Lachs — remained pretty much the only game in town until the 1940s, when the advent of large-scale refrigeration rendered salting unnecessary, thus paving the way for the introduction of smoked salmon.

Lox is sometimes referred to as a variety of smoked salmon (as smoked salmon is sometimes known by the generic term “lox”), but this is a mistake, for no smoke is used making lox. Instead, the salmon is immersed in a salt brine — just salt and water, nothing else — for anywhere from three to six months, after which the fish is removed and then briefly washed to remove excess salt. This is the entire process. At no point is the salmon subjected to any smoking, any drying or even any heating. (Mark Federman of Russ & Daughters likes to refer to lox as “Jewish sushi.”)

In the old days, the lox came either from wild Pacific salmon or wild salmon caught in the waters off Nova Scotia or the nearby Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. Today, wild Atlantic salmon is seriously in danger of becoming extinct, and Atlantic salmon comes instead from vast fish farms, most of them in Norway and Chile, with others in the Faeroe Islands, near Scotland. (Though Chile borders the Pacific Ocean, its salmon came originally from Norway and so is considered Atlantic.) Farm-raised Atlantic salmon are richer and fattier than their wild counterparts, which makes sense, given their comparatively sedentary lifestyle (no swimming upstream to spawn and so forth). Wild Pacific salmon, most of which come from Alaska, tend to have a stronger taste and a firmer texture, although paradoxically enough, they create a softer lox, for reasons that no one in the business seems able to explain fully.

Although the term “Nova” originally referred to lox, today it most often refers to smoked salmon, which is testament to the dramatic shifts that have taken place in the appetizing case.

Nowadays, Nova refers not to a type of fish, but rather to a type of smoking, one that has been tailored to the tastes of New York consumers. Said Buzz Billik, vice president of sales at Acme, “There are pockets in the Midwest and the West Coast that enjoy heavier smoke in the product, but this isn’t a New York taste preference. Here they like it lightly salted, lightly smoked.” At Acme, the salmon (which, as is standard in the business, almost always arrive frozen and must first be defrosted) are placed in tubs of brine containing a mixture of salt and brown sugar. They remain in these tubs in the curing room — which, like most parts of a smokehouse, is quite chilly, about 38 degrees — for seven days, at which point they are removed from the brine and laid out on metal screens for smoking. The salmon are smoked for 18 to 24 hoursº at a temperature ranging from about 70 to 76 degrees. This process, known as “cold smoking,” imparts flavor and removes moisture, creating the firm, silky texture that allows the fish to be thinly sliced. Hot smoking, which produces baked — also called “kippered” — salmon, is begun at 100 degrees and then proceeds upward to 200 degrees, with a total cooking time of some six to eight hours. (This must be done slowly, otherwise the fish will broil, tearing the skin and turning the flesh milky.)

The wood Acme uses for its smoking is a blend of apple and cherry, which, said Billik, “adds flavor to the cure.” At Banner, Avi Attias uses maple for his smoking and disparages the use of fruitwood for smoking fish. “Hickory is best for meat, hardwood for fish,” he said. “Fruit gives it a sweet smell, but we’re not selling candy, we’re selling fish.”

Attias, who is in his mid-30s, started in the fish business when he was 16. (“Why?” he said amusedly. “Because I’m an idiot — I should have gone to college.”) At Acme, the fourth generation of the Caslow family is now working in the company, and, as it happens, this is true at Russ & Daughters as well, where Mark Federman has recently brought on his daughter Niki and nephew Josh to work in the store. The smoked-fish trade is going strong, and its New York outposts seem to be assured of at least another generation’s span. Whether, at the end of that time, they will still be producing and selling lox is anybody’s guess.

Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/7669/#ixzz1fLr0sPI7

These are the kings everyone has been enjoying. This is when they were right out of the water in Alaska last week. We still have a few more kings here including one white king! We head back to Alaska to catch our own kings here in a few week so come to the Falls Church Market this Sat. (May 11) and stock up. It will be our last Saturday market until the late fall!

This spring the city of Falls Church put out this video to showcase what a wonderful place Falls Church, Virginia is to live and work. They saw fit to include us. We are honored.

A spring treat has arrived — Sablefish & King!

2013 Salmon Preorder Season is Here!

The winter is melting into the recesses of our minds (especially with this hot weather!) and another season of fishing in Alaska is upon us. Although we’ll be sad to leave the area and stop attending the farmers markets for the summer, we’re getting excited about heading north to Alaska once again to fish all summer.

When we start planning for the fishing season, you know it must be time to get your 2013 preorders in to us. If you have already preordered, great, we have your order here and we’re just dying to get north and catch it! If you haven’t mailed your preorder in yet, here are the ways to secure your share of this summer’s catch:

The weather wasn’t so great today at the farmers market but we made the most of it with some good conversations, laughs and lots of trading. Look at all this wonderful food I traded salmon for with other vendors!

We always feel really lucky to spend our summers at our fish camp in Western Alaska. One of the most amazing features of Bristol Bay (in addition to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, lots of brown/grizzly bears and huge herds of caribou) are the walrus (Odobenus rosmarus). Most folks know the word “walrus” but few people can create a clear picture in their mind’s eye of what this strange sub-arctic marine creature actually looks like.

In Bristol Bay we are fortune to have most of the walrus “haulouts” (beaches and rocks where walrus get out of the water) in Alaska. Round Island near Togiak is a major haulout with some 14,000 walrus counted on its shores in one day. The others are Capes Peirce and Newenham (in the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge), and Seniavin (near Port Moller) also in or near Bristol Bay. As the winter pack ice recedes out of Bristol Bay in the spring, male walrus move into these areas to bask in the sun between feeding excursions. When we fly into fishcamp in small planes we often follow the beaches, sometimes for safety in fog and sometimes looking for beach treasures and walrus.

Hundreds of miles of black sand beach slip by under the plane as we fly into fish camp––this is the north side of Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands stretching away from Alaska and 2,200 miles all the way to Russia. The black silky texture of the sand met by the mossy green of the tundra and confronted by the angry grey/blue of the Bering sea combine here to form the perfect backdrop on which to see the gleaming white ivory tusks and hulking tan bodies of sunning walrus.

Walrus Facts:

• Walrus skin is almost an inch thick.
• Walrus can weigh up to 2,000 lbs. and be 12 feet long.
• Walrus use their tusks for fighting (males) and for excavating mollusks (clams) and other creatures from the seabed.
• Although protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, a few thousand walrus are hunted in Alaska and Russia by Native peoples.
• Walrus meat, blubber and skin are used by western and northern native peoples now as they have for thousands of years. The skin can be used to cover boats and the stomach lining is used to make traditional drums.
• Want to see walrus in real life? Visit the seven islands of the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary (WISGS) in our lovely Bristol Bay between May 1 and August 15 with a permit from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. And bring your tent, you’ll be camping! Click here for more info

From: Top Chef

Earlier this winter, the popular TV show Top Chef filmed their 10th episode in Juneau, Alaska and featured salmon among other seafood. Maybe I should just speak for myself, but I’ll bet most Alaskan fishermen felt an overwhelming sense of pride when our lovely seafood was featured for  the show’s almost 2 million viewers in more than 10 countries. I know I did.

The spectacle of reality TV (and TV in general) can be distasteful, but I was excited to see the recipes the contestants (called rather stupidly “cheftestants”) would come up with. All were heavy handed but some good ideas for cooking salmon came to my attention. The contestant Sheldon came up with a smoked salmon & pea soup (with green tea & chive sourdough bread on the side) that fell flat with every last one of the judges. The host, Padma’s culinary pedigree (Playboy cover, modeling, unmemorable movies and TV and a few cookbooks) doesn’t hold a lot of water for me but her word is life and death to the contestants, and she didn’t like this one. Sheldon took a lot of flak for using chum salmon (also called dog salmon or keta) but I applauded. Keta is just one of the five species of wild salmon found in Alaskan, all of which are amazing in their own right, and keta is no exception. The only mark against keta in my book? It lacks the amazing color of sockeye, but all salmon pales in comparison (pun intended) to the color of sockeye. The next contestant, Josh, whipped up a roasted garlic sourdough soup with sockeye salmon & black olive croutons and the judges received it well enough. Lizzie put out a citrus & beet glazed salmon slider with poppy seed butter & pickles (I want to try this one with some tweaks!) while Brooke, who went on to win the bout, crafted a sockeye salmon & seafood broth with mustard seed caviar and dill sourdough bread on the side.

For the most part I was underwhelmed by the cooking and overwhelmed by the phony drama. But I am thankful for the episode and the respect they tried to show the land and seafood. I did gleaned some tips from their culinary flailing that I will incorporate into my own cooking at some point. The show does reach the masses though and promoting Alaskan salmon (and not just salmon salmon, ie farmed salmon) is a boon to the environment, us fishermen and the health of salmon eaters worldwide.

A customer turned us on to this recipe and although we have not tried it, I think it looks tasty. I made some modifications from the original recipe so the flavor of the salmon comes through. I removed the mustard because the flavor is generally too strong to use with salmon. However, I have not made this recipe yet and I am not certain the walnuts will stick to the salmon without it. If someone tries it before me, please report back!

Check out the Washington Post for the original recipe.

Number of servings (yield): 4

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup raw unsalted walnut halves
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard (OPTIONAL)
• 1/8 teaspoon sea salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Four 6-ounce skin-on, center-cut salmon fillets, 3/4 to 1 inch thick

Our friends Raeanne and Steve shared this recipe From Epicurious with us and we love it’s simplicity and wonderful taste. Like all good fish, the simpler the cooking method the better, and this recipe fits the bill. The salt bed is not as much for flavor as for an even moisture-retaining heat. In another recipe, Chef Jenn Louis recommends a sheet of parchment paper over the salt bed with the salmon on top of the paper to prevent a strong salt taste. She also recommends serving the salmon with butter-braised turnips, see below for the recipe.

Number of servings (yield): 4

Ingredients:

• 2 cups coarse sea salt or kosher salt
• 1 (1 1/4-pound) center-cut piece salmon fillet