Salt Block Gravlax

Impress your Jewish grandma with gravlax, or just impress yourself. Actually, my Nana preferred the cold-smoked cousin, lox, but gravlax is an incredibly easy, positively delicious way to cure salmon. The name comes from any number of Nordic fish dishes inspired by the openly morbid technique of burying in the ground (grave) your salmon (lax) with some salt cure. I like this dish because it yields a particularly moist, delicate, and lightly salted gravlax, since the salinity of the salt block does not migrate as readily into the fish flesh as a packed cure of loose salt. Also, because you don’t need plates and weights, and because the salt blocks can be reused over and over again, the method boasts a certain elegance and economy of tools. See page 267 for more about salt blocks.