"SmokedSalmon" news and stories

Day Two in our four-day run of cool salads for hot days features a combination that is visually stunning but that you may find a bit odd. Shaking up the taste buds is good for you, though, so while at first blush the idea of smoked salmon with melon and strawberries sounds unappealing, give it a shot. Montréal photographer Chrystian Guy used salmon that's maple-syrup cured, so when he mixes it with mâche, the fruit, some yellow onion, chickpeas, and a dressing of olive oil and a squeeze of lime juice, the smooth, sweet maple notes actually blend right in.

I hunted around Kitchen Daily and found that chef Marcus Samuelsson is a fish-and-fruit kind of guy. Try his recipe for jicama-and-mango salad with salmon.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool for a shot of having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

Photo: Zen Can Cook

Smoked salmon is rarely seen out of the company of a bagel and thick smear of cream cheese, particularly at the breakfast table. But this photo, taken by zenchef of Zen Can Cook, presents an incredibly tempting alternative. What you're looking at is Scottish smoked salmon, perched on top of a pea pancake and crowned with a bit of crème fraiche and Meyer lemon. Granted, it takes a little more preparation than slicing open a bagel, but colors and flavor combinations like these are well worth the effort.

[Via Zen Can Cook]

There's smoked salmon and then there's smoked salmon. Cosmopolitan's Blog brings us the latter. The Hong Kong-based chef smokes his salmon on skewers in a jar that when opened at the table, gives diners a fragrant smoke along with their salmon.

When I was in Seattle last weekend, I couldn't help but notice a popular (and clever!) bumper sticker all over the city: "Farm-Raised Salmon Dyed for You."

Meanwhile, an interesting article in the New York Times dropped some remarkable facts about recent trends in smoked salmon:

• Many -- nay, most -- major retailers on both coasts and in the Midwest (Wegmans and Costco included) buy their smoked salmon from one source: Brooklyn's Acme Smoked Fish.

• Whereas the industry shifted from nearly exclusive use of wild salmon in the 1980s to farm-raised salmon in the 1990s, recent bad press about farm-raised salmon -- like the aforementioned bumper sticker -- has caused the industry to swing back towards wild salmon.
• Smoked salmon has undergone a remarkable shift of late: unlike most everything else, smoked salmon is less salty than ever before. 

Still to be determined is how the Pacific Northwest wry bumper sticker industry will respond.