A curing recipe

Black treacle, sugar, salt and spices

I thought I’d share a recipe today. Something different that will keep you busy for a few days. Yes, that’s right. A few days.

It’s a curing recipe for fish, similar to how gravadlax is made, though some of the ingredients I use here are different. It’s quite straightforward even if you’ve never attempted anything similar before. The technique is one of the first things I show new cooks, as making it gives them a real sense of achievement. It’s also a traditional skill from the past, made relevant again. All good restaurants will be preserving something with salt and sugar.

You’ll be familiar with gravadlax I’m sure, so I’m not going to show you that, though I might give you one of my interpretations of the dill-cured classic another day. Here I’d like to show you how to make a black treacle, caraway and orange cured sea trout. You can certainly use salmon instead, in fact, I’d positively encourage it, but sea trout is at its best at the moment, having returned to our rivers from its journey out to sea.

After curing, the fish emerges from its black sticky cure similar to a fish pastrami, it’s sweet and has a deep flavour of warm spices and dark sugar. This is excellent with dill pickles, brown bread and butter and I challenge you to give it a go. It makes a fair amount, but you should slice it at about four millimetres per slice so it’ll be eaten quite quickly. You could always freeze your leftovers.

Treacle cured with citrus, caraway and pepper