Before I had my restaurant I worked in catering, and I know there are a lot of bad things to say about catering — dry chicken and limp salad — but as a cook you get enormous exposure to a vast catalog of ingredients and cuisines. On a given workday, the staff might be preparing for a Greek wedding, a Japanese Embassy function, a Middle Eastern Sabbath dinner, an Italian feast, a Nordic baby shower, along with a board-of-directors power breakfast and a U.S. Open V.I.P. tailgate picnic. Within the same eight-hour prep shift, you have to know how to work with Israeli couscous as well as hazelnut meringue, and be able to pivot between phyllo dough and bluefin tuna, fresh bergamot and sesame paste.
But yes, there is an unbelievable amount of salmon. Not just the stock-in-trade five-ounce portioned fillets but also pinwheels and roulades and planked slabs. Tartares and citrus marinades and cold smokes. In catering there is just so much salmon.
Still, I think it’s a thrill to know how to butcher a whole one properly, breaking down a 12-to-15-pounder without any shingling or chiseling, without losing the portion closest to the gills. Being able to run your tweezers down the whole length of the fish and get a clean pull of every pin bone without mauling the flesh is a mile marker in a cook’s career. And even after facing some thousands, I’m never bored to see that speckled silver beast glimmering on my cutting board, and I openly smile every time the wildly counterintuitive scent of fresh watermelon wafts up when you split it open. (The first time I broke down a whole salmon, the watermelon freshness was so powerful that I thought someone else in the kitchen had started assembling the fruit trays for a gallery opening.)
And though I’ll never need to bake another five-ounce fillet as long as I live, I find the gravlax cure nothing short of marvelous. I love to make it and to eat it. It’s exciting to watch a raw slab of salmon transform from oily, flabby orange to translucent, dense persimmon red under the influence of just sugar and salt and time in the fridge. It’s a great starter for a dinner party — nothing pairs with an icy vodka martini quite like it; just rinse the glasses with aquavit instead of vermouth! — but even better in a brunch spread, with pumpernickel bread and dill butter and a pitcher of Danish Marys out on the counter.
Whether you butcher your own salmon or buy a whole slab already prepped by the fishmonger is your call. The important thing is to start the cure a full five days before you want to serve it, so that the fish will “cook,” weighted down under its blanket of salt and sugar, and become well seasoned with its thick carpet of chopped fresh dill and the heavy-handed dusting of fresh ground black pepper. Think of the cure like steeping a tea bag: too short a dunk, and you get wan tea; too long, and your brew gets rather intense. So you can pull the fish early by a day or two, but you’ll find it unremarkable. And you can leave it for up to 10 days, but you’ll be heading toward salmon jerky.
I keep the salmon in the walk-in under a few heavy cans of olive oil or plum tomatoes, and soon the fatty orange flesh becomes denser and starts to take on that satisfying seasoning — a little sharp from the black pepper and fresh from the dill and rounded out from the sugar. The sugar and salt draw the moisture from the flesh and internally season it at the same time. The cure becomes liquid after a day in the refrigerator, and at the end of the third day, you can flip the fillet over, skin side up now, flesh submerged in the liquid, to be sure each side of the salmon has ample time in the flavored liquid. When you pull it out of the cure at the end of the week, you will see how changed the texture is — and you’ll feel it too, as you slice thin sheets with a sharp, beveled blade. The slices will feel a little leathery, but I mean that in the best way: buttery Italian couch leather, not Charlie Chaplin shoe leather.
I don’t love the traditional accompanying sauce of brown sugar, mustard and dill, so now that I’m my own employer, I serve the gravlax the way I most like to eat it: sliced thin, and laid generously on black pumpernickel bread, with a little schmear of butter seasoned with minced shallots, fresh dill and mustard. For my money, that is a very fine Sunday-morning alternative to the bagel, cream cheese and lox routine.
This gravlax freezes well, defrosts well and is much less expensive than the prepared salmon at the gourmet deli, which is another old catering trick I’m sure we could all find useful. I could also show you how we used to get that rubber chicken rubbery and how we used to get the salads to wilt just in time for the sit-down plated dinner in Banquet Hall C on level mezzanine, but let’s start with this catering success: your own cured gravlax, in your own house, made start to finish by you, and so tasty that you’ll still be excited to eat it even after you’ve made thousands. How great to be able to lay this out at brunch next weekend — and countless weekends ahead.
