Fred's gravlax Here's an alternate recipe for gravlax, even more labor intensive. Same fish; except I skin mine. I take my fillet knife and separate the flesh from the skin. I then also trim out any dark flesh on the skin side (often a thin section in the center). Also I trim off any white stuff and if there is a real thin flap near the belly side that gets cut off too (throw it in a soup) Same trick with the tweezers 3 medium size red onions 1 cup Kosher (sea) salt 3/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon white pepper chopped fresh dill. The labor intensive part is getting the juice out of the red onions. Peel them and cut them up in chunks and throw them in your blender. Chop, stir, pulverize, whatever settings you have until you have a container full of onion slurppee. For the next part I suggest wearing latex gloves unless you want to wear a unique scent for about a week. You are going to be spooning big dollops of onion slurppee into a cheese cloth and twisting and squeezing the juice out into a bowl. The first time I did it bare handed it took a week to get the onion smell off my hands. OK, this is going to take awhile. Rinse the pulp off the cheese cloth after every squeezing. Three onions should give you about two cup of juice. Stir in the salt, sugar, pepper and about a handful of chopped dill. Cut the fillet in half and lay the sections side by side in a suitably sized zip lock plastic bag (just big enough). I place the bag on a cookie sheet. Carefully pour the onion juice/salt/sugar mix into the bag. The salt/sugar is far from in total solution but scoop all the sludge into the bag. Slosh it around a bit but don't worry if the salt/sugar seems to be clumped in places. It all works out. Carefully expel as much air as you can from the bag and zip it shut. Set the cookie sheet in the bottom of the refrigerator and put a twin second cookie sheet on top of the bag. Weight it down. I use three bricks. Since the bag and juice is sort of pillow-like you want to be sure the top cookie sheet is level, exerting constant pressure, so the three bricks work great since you can slide them back and forth until you get the right arrangement. Leave it in the process for 18 hours, don't turn it. Take the fish out of the bag, rinse off, pat dry. spread some of the reserved dry chopped fresh dill on one side, wrap it in plastic wrap or foil. Same thin slicing advice. Serve with thin slices of lightly buttered bread. My wife likes to chop up some green onions and hard boiled eggs. I just want a squeeze of lemon juice. Here's the most important part. Serve with small glasses of Aaltborg Aquvit or a very top grade vodka which has been in the freezer. Should be the consistency of syrup. Skoal Fred sent me this revised version of his version: I have made some changes to my gravlax recipe which makes it much more user friendly. The biggest pain (and probably what may have turned people off) was extracting the onion juice from the pureed red onion slurpee. I have solved that problem. Don't extract the juice - just marinate in the slurpee with the other ingredients added. So now I just cut up one large red onion and pop it into the blender. To get things spinning well a little liquid helps the process. What better liquid than a little vodka, or aquavit, or Single Malt Whiskey. Then I mix in the salt, sugar, pepper, and chopped dill (the slurpee keeps the chopped dill suspended throughout better) and pour the mess into the plastic ziplock bag over the salmon. Same weight down process. I have increased the process time to 24 hours vice 18 and it seems about right. And now the Ph.D. of gravlax making. I have perfected smoked salmon, like you pay $40.00 a pound for in the finest delis. The secret is COLD SMOKE. You don't want the gravlax to cook. I have a Brinkman Smoker which stands about a meter tall so that keeps the coals a good distance from the food. I start the coals in my other charcoal grill. I soak hickory or other fruit wood chips in water until they are well saturated. I have a small metal open box which I fill with the soaked chips. Then I only put one or two (no more) hot charcoal pieces on top of the chips and set the box in the fire pan of my smoker. I put the gravlax filet on the top rack and smoke it for at least three hours. All you are doing is saturating it with smoke. Keep it cool. Unlike other smoke cooking, where you never open the cooker until it is done (since you will loose your precious heat) you can open the cooker as you like. In fact you should watch your heat gauge and open if it gets too hot. Renew the chips and new hot coals (from your other grill) when no more smoke comes out of the smoker. I think you could do all this in a regular charcoal grill but just KEEP IT COLD and keep the fish as far from the coals as possible. During the winter time there should be no problem. Slice it thin and enjoy. back