How to Make Salmon Gravlax | Swedish Food at Home

Learn how to make homemade Swedish salmon gravlax. It’s quite easy to make at home.

Gravlax is one of my favorite things at the smorgasbord table. You can buy smoked salmon at the store, but you can’t compare the flavor of making this Swedish food at home. Smoked salmon is as its name says, “smoked”, while gravlax is cured salmon with salt, sugar, pepper and dill.

The translation of gravlax is “grave salmon”, which refers to how this dish was originally prepared, buried in the ground. Back before refrigeration, people would use curing as a way of preserving their meats. 

Fishermen would wrap up their salmon and bury it in the sand above the shoreline. We continue this tradition today, but luckily we can use our refrigerator to cure to cure the salmon instead of burying it.

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When purchasing your salmon, make sure to get a very fresh, high-quality salmon fillet with the skin on. It is also recommended to buy a lean piece of fish. 

Farm-raised Atlantic Salmon is probably going to be too fatty for this purpose. The curing flavors will not infuse into the fatty parts of the fish. Try to get something like a wild-caught Sockeye Salmon.

Check out my video for this recipe! 

SALMON GRAVLAX VIDEO

Most recipes for gravlax recommend using white peppercorn. White peppercorn seems to be pretty common in a lot of Swedish cooking. White pepper his a more subtle than black pepper. I wasn’t able to find white peppercorn at the store, so I just used black peppercorn. I think my gravlax had too much sharp pepper flavor as a result.

Gravlax is generally served by itself, with lemon slices and dill to garnish.  You can accompany it with a mustard dill sauce.  I usually buy mustard dill sauce from IKEA, buy it is also easy to make yourself.  I like to put gravlax on crisp bread, or dark rye bread with butter.

This is a fun recipe to make. I love the process of curing something in my refrigerator for three days and tasting the results three days later. It’s interesting to me how just using salt and sugar you can cure something at home. And it’s more economical than buying smoked salmon from the store, (and tastier too!). 

SALMON GRAVLAX RECIPE

Ingredients:

1 1/2 to 2 pound center-cut, skin-on salmon filet

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup kosher salt

1 tablespoon freshly ground white pepper

1 bunch fresh dill

Begin by removing any bones from the salmon fillet. Gently run your fingers along the center of the salmon and you’ll feel the bones stick out. You can use your fingers, pliers or tweezers to remove them.

Cut the salmon in half crosswise so that both halves of the fillet are approximately the same size.

In a small bowl combine the sugar, salt and pepper. Then gently rub the mixture over both sides of the salmon. Skin side and flesh side until the fish is completely covered.

Place the dill on the flesh side of one of the fillets, then take the other half and place it on top of the dill, making a sandwich (skin side out). Wrap the salmon tightly with plastic wrap and place it inside of sealable plastic bag. Place in a shallow dish and put a heavy object on top, like a cast iron skillet or a brick.

Refrigerate for three days turning the bag twice daily.

Remove from the refrigerator and unwrap from the plastic wrap. Remove dill and scrape off any excess sugar mixture. On a cutting board use a sharp knife to cut the salmon thinly. Cut at an angle and the salmon should pull away from the skin. Be careful not to cut through the skin.

Sprinkle some chopped dill on top and serve cold. It will last up to seven days refrigerator.