Field to Feast: Dill

When Kasha suggested dill as an ingredient for this week’s Field to Feast challenge, I was stumped. It doesn’t grow well on my deck, so I never have it around and therefore haven’t really experimented with it beyond the occasional pickles or recipes here and there that call for it. So perhaps this post is a little uninspired (salmon & dill? yaaaaawn), but I’ve really been wanting to make my own gravlax for a while and this seemed the perfect opportunity.

I turned to the internet, as always, and most of the recipes I found were pretty similar — salt, sugar, dill and perhaps some spices to shake things up. Keeping with my preference of staying simple the first go-round, I chose to follow Mark Bittman’s recipe with a beautiful Copper River salmon filet I picked up at Fairway.

I don’t know what scared me off of this for so many years because honestly, it couldn’t have been simpler to make. Removing the pin bones was the most tedious part, but with the help of a dedicated pair of tweezers, it took all of three minutes. Then I piled on the cure mix, sprinkled it with a little vodka, and packed on the chopped dill. After that, it’s just a matter of wrapping it in plastic, putting it in a dish covered with a flat surface (I used a tiny cutting board), and weighing it down with cans. And waiting. After two days, a lot of liquid had been extruded into the dish. I unwrapped the salmon, removed a little of the cure, and sliced off a few pieces to try. It was salmon flavor x10, lightly cured and silky on the tongue. I couldn’t be happier with the results of my first experiment. More to follow with added spices…