By Andrea Strafile

How Your Supermarket Smoked Salmon Is Made

Smoked salmon comes in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your Basics range odds and ends, your standard mid-range fare, the more expensive stuff that’s disturbingly orange for a product that, famously, is usually very pink.

What I’m trying to say is that there are plenty of options, all at relatively affordable prices. Seems like a no-brainer. But Italian salmon expert Claudio Cerati of Upstream Salmons says there are a few key things to look out for while picking your fish.

Cerati knows his stuff. For 12 years, he refined a smoked salmon recipe that he would give to friends as a Christmas present. “Then they convinced me that I should start producing it commercially,” he says.

To make a quality product like Cerati, there are three main stages.

First, the fish is divided into fillet, side, belly, rump and escalope – and the heart of the fillet is the most valuable part. A dry rub of salt and then sugar is applied, then rinsed. The rub is a key part of the recipe, and you can add different spices to the salt if you wish.

After the salmon is rinsed, it’s time for the all-important smoking. “We stretch the fish out and smoke it for two hours with small bursts of smoke, using beech wood from the Parma Apennines,” says Cerati.

The mid-range supermarket salmon might be a decent fillet that’s had a salt rub and been smoked over lesser-quality wood for a few hours. But the cheaper supermarket salmon is often smoked more aggressively in high temperature ovens, or even has the smoky flavor added chemically.

Decades of changes to fishing and production processes led to smoked salmon losing its luxury quality somewhat. In the 70s, “aquaculture” took hold in Norway and spread around the world, marking a shift from salmon being wild caught to being farmed en masse in seawater cages.

“Good salmon comes from two places – either it is caught wild using sustainable fishing practices, or it is reared by a breeder who really knows fish. There’s a lot of criticism of breeders, but there are intensive forms of rearing and less intensive forms of rearing.”

If smoke is written in the ingredients, it usually means chemicals have been added afterwards for flavor. Last year, the New York Times reported that cheap smoking techniques could be linked to cancer.

Good salmon usually costs a lot and comes in nice packaging. It’s just that simple. “The price has to be at least $13-$15/3.5 oz. But you probably won’t find really good salmon like that in the supermarket, so make the trip to your local deli or fishmonger,” Cerati concludes.

Visit MUNCHIES for more recipes and cooking tips.

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