Posted on 12/07/2023 12:00:46 PM PST by DallasBiff
Could be called soap-fisk.
Gravlax is cured salmon, sliced thin and usually served with a little mustard sauce. Traditional lox is similar, neither are smoked.
Certain pizzas give me weird dreams. It’s in the cheese. The last weird dream I had was laced with lutefisk references, and I didn’t even know in any detail what it is. Now I know.
Found the following on the interwebs on the origins of gravlax. Today it is made differently:
The origin of gravlax can be traced all the way back to 14th-century North-Sweden. In the Middle-Ages, salt was expensive and most foods had to be preserved using alternative methods. In North-Sweden, peasants and fishermen developed a unique technique called gravad lax (“buried salmon” hence the name gravlax): The filleted salmon was placed in a hole in the earth, covered with birch bark and laid in a bath of water, the fish’s own blood and various spices and herbs. The result was a rather strong-smelling product that would be closer to todays infamous surströmming (fermented herring) than the gravlax that is eaten nowadays.
Well, thank you kindly. I learned something today. I figured your allusion to “buried” was, well, nuts, so I did a quick look only.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I need to remember.
Have a good one!
Thanks for the clarification. As always, the information presented by the media is incomplete and ignorant of the situation being reported.
Pickled herring is good. I tried lutefisk ONCE, for breakfast, at a local Swedish restaurant. Screwed up my system for the whole day.
Never again….
I don’t think I’ll ever try it.
I think it’s very good for you - D3 and other nutrients.
If you have even the slightest ‘reaction’ to lye, don’t even touch lutefisk, you will find out the hard way, a stomach ache or worse ... not dissimilar to a crawdad boil where you don’t know your iodine tolerance.
I was close to some once. Got a sniff. DID NOT acquire a taste.
Had consistency of wet toilet paper with a fishy flavor. Often served with mashed potatoes and sometimes a white butter sauce. Minnesota humorist Garrison Keilor said that in Norwegian cooking the whiteness was more important than the taste
Growing up in Minnesota, every fall our (Norwegian) Lutheran Church would host a ‘Lutefisk Dinner’. It was absolutely great. Hundreds of people were fed. We would sit upstairs in the sanctuary, waiting for our ticket numbers to be called, with the smell of coffee, buttered mashed potatoes, roast turkey, and pies, AND lefse wafting up from the basement. The food was unlimited, and, coming from the Ladies Aid, was perfect. Except for one thing: DON’T EAT THE LUTEFISK!
I lived in Minneapolis for 2 years. Lutefisk is awful. I mean AWFUL.
Trust me.
“The kitchen smells funny for about a week.”
Not to mention the bathroom.
I worked in a small office, and one of the guys was Norwegian who had lutefisk on the traditional holidays. After he did his “business” once, the boss told him to take a vacation day after eating lutefisk, or use another bathroom.
Slimey snot taste, no power on this earth will ever get me to taste it again
I read somewhere else that the salt in the sand that they buried it in worked as a preservative too. There must be some reason that folks couldn’t just evaporate sea water in order to get salt if it was so rare and expensive back then.
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