Bay Area Bounty

West Marin at the end of March is a trip into Eden. The headlands have greened up from winter rains (admittedly spotty this year), the rivers run high, and the woods and meadows overflow with a riot of tangled undergrowth, much of it edible.

More than 20 years ago, when I lived briefly in Berkeley and San Francisco, I heard stories about Bolinas. Tucked away on a thumb of land south of Pt. Reyes and between the Pacific Ocean and Bolinas Lagoon, the community shunned conventional ways. The funny-looking locals farmed funny-looking crops in funny ways. Heck, maybe they even foraged (gasp!). This led to busloads of tourists wanting pictures of the native wildlife. Whenever the county erected a sign tipping off lookey-loos to their whereabouts, the locals tore it down. There's still no sign today, but the tenets of organic farming that began largely in this valley are now practiced all over the country; local artisan food makers are celebrated across the land for their award-winning breads, brews, cheeses, meats, and preserves; and foraging is just another common sense way to gather fresh, healthy food.

This past weekend, thanks to organizer Marin Organic, I joined with a few dozen food and outdoor lovers from all over the Bay to wander among the stunning beauty and bounty of Bolinas. [Listen to a radio story about the event here.] Kevin Feinstein, co-author of The Bay Area Forager, was on hand to share his local wisdom, and we were fortunate to have a few practicing chefs (plus eager students) to help with the afternoon feast. The weather looked ominous. Driving over Mount Tam, my rental car shook violently in the wind. Rain blowing in off the Pacific slashed sideways at my windshield. But by the time we poked our heads out from under the eaves of the Gospel Flat Farm stand, the rain had subsided and the sun was working hard to shoehorn clouds out the way.

Andrea Blum Photo

We all walked across the street to the Star Route Farms property that would be our primary hunting ground. Normally I wouldn't be enthusiastic about picking wild foods next to a farm, but Star Route has been organic for nearly four decades, and it shows. The rows between crops are loaded with weeds—healthy, nutritious, delicious weeds—weeds that get harvested right along with the domestic vegetables. [See top photo.] We picked nasturtium flowers, wild radish seed pods, mallow, cat's ear, and other weeds before climbing up into the wet jungle that rises above the farm, protecting its watershed with a forest of native trees and a host of native and non-native edible plants.

Robust patches of miner's lettuce forced us to choose our steps carefully lest we trample a good food source. The stinging nettles were tall, nearly too tall for harvest, so we snipped the tops of the youngest, tenderest plants. Chickweed flourished among the miner's lettuce. Huge thickets of thimbleberry, already budding out, towered above us on the hillside, and red elderberry in flower hung overhead. It was an orgy of wild foods. Kevin pulled a few thistles from the damp soil and demonstrated how to peel the lower stalk and boil the root (note to self: I really need to do a dedicated thistle post one of these days).

Andrea Blum Photo

Back at Gospel Flat we turned our attention to processing and cooking our catch. Everyone happily pitched in. The wine flowed. Kevin prepared a taste test of thistles, both raw and cooked, while the rest of us worked on the three main dishes of the day: oysters, soup, and salad. An appetizer of pan-fried oysters donated by Tomales Bay Oyster Company, dressed with a homemade aioli (thanks Kerry!) on Brick Maiden Bakery baguette, was devoured on the spot. Next came an enormous salad of miner's lettuce, chickweed, cat's ear, mallow, nasturtiums, wild onion, wild mustard flowers, and wild radish seed pods that filled an entire wash basin. Toasted walnuts, crumbled blue cheese from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese, and a raspberry vinaigrette added finishing touches to the salad.

Andrea Blum Photo

Meanwhile several volunteers chopped onions and garlic, peeled potatoes, and tended three kettles of Stinging Nettle Soup cooking on a propane stove on the back porch. Despite the early rain showers, the day was just getting better with each passing hour. We added a hearty pour of Straus Family cream to the soup and had at it.

Nothing beats tromping around in the woods in search of strange and often maligned plants and then transforming them into culinary marvels amidst a hubbub of wine and cheerful conversation. Coming together to nourish our minds and bodies was the order of the day. These are the basic underlying principles of community.

Photo Andrea Blum

Foraging is often seen as a survival skill, a way for the individual to go it alone in a harsh environment and still prosper. Though I value my alone time for art, contemplation, spiritual renewal, or any number of other things—and have indulged this solitary life for months at a time in the wilderness—at the end of the day I would never renounce my need or desire to be among other people, to share in ideas and joys, to participate in the human drama. For me, foraging is not a path to isolation—it's a way to connect.

I've been supremely disappointed in our U.S. Supreme Court in recent years as it seems to thumb its judicial nose at the very concept of community in America, as if liberty can only be defined as the individual giving the finger to everyone else. Clearly, since our institutions are failing us, it's up to us, the people, to create community—and to hold onto it dearly.

Truffle Nirvana

The woods were alive with the sounds of trufflers. Dozens of humans and canines barked and yipped and hollered their triumphs and failures through a gloomy grove of 25-year-old Douglas-firs. They ran to and fro, scratching in the dirt with paws and garden cultivators. Most were amateurs, brought together by the 7th annual Oregon Truffle Festival. Longtime truffle researcher Dan Luoma of Oregon State was on hand to offer guidance. Just about everyone found winter white truffles (Tuber oregonense), though the season's odd weather patterns meant that most of the truffles were still small and less than perfectly ripe.

Later, at a luncheon at Willamette Valley Vineyards, I ate one of the best truffle dishes I've ever had: a Pinot Noir-braised pork belly with white truffle-onion jam, dried cherries, and a frisee with raspberry-black truffle vinaigrette (see below). It was a perfectly balanced blend of flavors and textures that was expertly knitted together by the truffle jam. This was proof that an Oregon truffle experience could be a culinary epiphany rather than a shrug.

Eating our home-grown truffles is not always so revelatory. Truffles get raked up too young, sold to retailers who don't know any better, and then passed on to customers who have no benchmark for comparison.

Fortunately this is not the case with the Oregon Truffle Festival, which aims to educate as well as nourish. The talks and lectures from truffle experts the world over were illuminating, and though not every single dish served over the course of eight different multi-course meals throughout the weekend was a resounding success, most of the dishes used generous amounts of ripe truffles in toothsome ways that showed off the fungi's singular qualities.

The Oregon Truffle Festival is held at the end of January each year in Eugene, Oregon, in the southern Willamette Valley. The valley is ground zero for our native edible truffles, though they can be found from the Fraser River Valley in British Columbia south to Northern California, in low elevation coastal Douglas-fir forests. This contrasts with European truffles, which are generally found in hardwoods.

Photo: Jen Reyneri

During our bus ride to the truffle patch, Luoma, a forest ecologist, explained that the Willamette Valley offers the best climatic conditions for our native truffles (not too hot in summer, not too cold in winter) and that truffles in general seem to prefer habitats near human activity, in particular cleared agricultural fields replanted with orchards. Truffles have long been associated with wine country, and this association is true for the vineyards of Willamette Valley, many of which have nearby Christmas tree farms or planted groves of Douglas-fir for timber or water retention.

In addition to the guided forays and lectures, the festival included dog-training workshops, cooking classes, and a grower's forum for the brave cultivation set.

Saturday night's Grand Truffle Dinner, the coup de grace, was as over the top as promised. I arrived, along with 300 other guests, at a hotel ballroom suffused with the aroma of Oregon black truffles (Leucangium carthusianum). Three-hundred plates covered three long prep tables as the first course made its debut, each plate decorated with a square of Celery Root & Black Truffle Panna Cotta topped with Dungeness Crab Salad & Parisian Pears. The kitchen staff, armed with mandolines, roamed up and down the line, shaving away. The scent of black truffles hung in the air like a heavy fog. Indeed, it was nearly disorienting.

My favorite dish of the night was probably the second course, White Truffle Scented Red & White Quinoa in a Creamy Risotto Style with Riesling Poached Hen's Egg, Shaved Coppa, Wild Winter Herbs, Lemon Thyme Emulsion & Shaved White Truffles. My favorite dessert of the weekend was a chorus of truffled sweets served earlier that day at Willamette Valley Vineyards: White Truffle Panna Cotta, White Truffle Raspberry Mousse, White Truffle Infused Tapioca, and White Truffle Brittle.

If you're a lover of truffles who can't afford a trip to Italy (and who can these days?) or simply curious, I highly recommend the Oregon Truffle Festival. Though not exactly inexpensive, the festival delivers plenty of value for the cost, and as far as I could tell there was no scrimping on the truffles. Festival founders Charles Lefevre and Leslie Scott run an action-packed weekend and the attendees are fun people who enjoy a good time. I made a lot of new friends at the festival, which is reason enough to spend a weekend in the beautiful and bounteous Willamette Valley.

Mountain Morels

Morel season is over, but at the Perennial Plate my new friends Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine have captured on video the thrill of the hunt and the lip-smacking toast of success that is a fruitful morel foray in a truly beautiful place. Check it out!


The Perennial Plate Episode 69: Mountain Morels from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

Down the Rabbit Hole with David Arora, Part 2

It's no secret that I enjoy spending time with "the mushroom people." (Think 1950s sci-fi flick, with a menacing invasion of creatures who fail to conform to the American standard of ignorant mall-walker.) Many of the mushroom people I know, while being a diverse lot overall, share a few similar traits in common. They like to tromp around all day in the outdoors. By night they're in their kitchens, cooking up the day's catch and drinking wine. They take pride in lost skills such as recognizing the plants and animals around them; cooking from scratch; and home-brewing, distilling, and wine-making. What's not to like? These are my people.

And so it was a pleasure to recently visit the home in Gualala, California, of one of the mushroom people trailblazers ("take me to your leader..."). After the Albion weekend concluded a couple dozen of us drove an hour down the coast to David Arora's house, where another week of foraying and feasting went on, capped by a Saturday workshop on the magic of fire—hearth-cooking—taught by Arora's good friend William Rubel. Imagine lighting out for the universe only to find a planet where the people looked  a lot like you but actually respected the natural environment and used its offerings to make wonderful food and drink.

Arora's house is the ultimate shrine to the mushroom people. The San Francisco Chronicle has already done a piece on it (click for slideshow), so I won't belabor the point. Just try to picture a labyrinthine cabin in the coastal mountains overlooking the Pacific, a place designed to entertain scores of mushroom people at once, with beds tucked away in corners and in lofts all over the house (including the amazing mushroom loft with its giant toadstool steps), five fireplaces for warmth, and several additional out-buildings for the overflow, including a "princess suite" and the "Saloon," where games of dominoes and cards are waged with drams of the hard stuff. I didn't see a single TV.

Arora is a collector. A collector of mushrooms, antiques, stories, even people. Guests included husband-and-wife jump blues musicians from Oakland, a public defender from Spokane, a Sonoma wine maker, a Washington State wine distributor, a wandering poet of unknown address, a local Mendocino forester, a Vancouver Island hotelier and co-founder of Slow Food Canada, another Canadian"nature awareness mentor," two seaglass divers from Santa Cruz, a San Francisco web developer, and the Ashland, Oregon-based discoverer of the world’s first aquatic mushroom.

The first night's revelry included a big sit-down dinner using Thanksgiving leftovers (Turkey and Chanterelle Tetrazzini), Hedgehog Crostini, a salad of baby lettuces and wild wood-sorrel, and an arsenal of wines complements of the guest distributor and hotelier. The toasting sticks (pictured left and below) got plenty of use and the musicians helped us work off dinner with a wild set of boogie-woogie.

Over the next few days a few of us made mushroom forays to Salt Point State Park, Jackson State Forest, and even on the property itself, which, during a midnight foray lit by headlamp, yielded baskets of white and golden chanterelles, matsutake, saffron milkcaps, shrimp russulas, and man on horseback mushrooms. Arora is a big fan of grilling marinated russulas over the fire, and I have to admit I'm now a believer in this edible mushroom that nevertheless often earns the distinction of being "better kicked than picked." After thoroughly cleaning the cap, just brush on some olive oil and chopped garlic before roasting over hot coals until both sides are lightly browned. 

My last night was the hearth-cooking class. Along with a dozen students up from the Bay Area, we string-roasted legs of lamb by the fire, cooked wild greens and a mushroom tart over the coals, and made an amazing apple tatin—all by the hearth, with instruction (and occasional poetry readings) from Rubel. Great merriment and food enlivened a rainy night. It's hard not to see the hearth-cooking as a metaphor. 

If this all seems like hagiography, let me say that in these dark days of the Republic, when our elected officials on both sides of the aisle will mostly be remembered as the butts of late night TV jokes, it seems high time to present an alternative vision. I couldn't imagine a better place to be on Black Friday than Mendocino County, among the mushroom people. The rest of the week only confirmed my belief in the need for Americans to cease trying to fill the voids in their lives with stuff and instead reconnect with immaterial things of true and lasting value.

I know, it's a tough choice: fight your way through the mall-walking throngs in search of the latest Furby—or sit around a table having a pointless discussion with other humans about such useless endeavors as art, travel, and natural history. After all, didn't we have a recent U.S. president who made a political virtue of his lack of curiosity?

If you think you'd like to present yourself as a candidate for mushroom people abduction, I'd recommend joining a local mycological club. My own, the Puget Sound Mycological Society, is one of the great deals in clubdom, with an annual membership of $30 that gets you invited to free forays all over the state during the  spring and fall mushroom seasons as well as monthly meetings with speakers and slideshows and much more. Other storied places where the mushroom people meet include the annual Breitenbush Mushroom Conference in the Oregon Cascades, which includes all of the above fun plus natural hot springs, and SOMA Camp, a three-day event in January sponsored by the Sonoma Mycological Association.

Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook

Here at FOTL Headquarters we're honored to announce our selection in the brand new Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook!

Last year food bloggers from around the world submitted entries to Foodista's contest—the first ever of its kind—and now the winners have been collected in this handsome full-color cookbook, which includes the text, photos, and recipes from the original blog posts.

You might remember my winning posts: Salmon Head Soup and Geoduck Ceviche.

The book is divided into "Cocktails and Appetizers"; "Soups and Salads"; "Main Dishes"; "Side Dishes"; and "Desserts," with 100 recipes in all. Included are other wild food recipes such as Chanterelle Mushrooms with Blue Cheese Pie; Scallop Sandwiches; Tagliatelle with Wild Boar Ragu; Prickly Pear Granita; and Blackberry Sorbet.

You can read more about it here.

Steelhead Camp

My friend Beedle has been regaling me with tales of steelhead camp for as long as I can remember. A couple weeks ago I finally got to see it for myself.

After an 18-hour drive from Seattle, plus a few hours of winks  in Prince George, we pulled into camp on the Kispiox River, tributary to the Skeena, near the small community of New Hazelton, British Columbia, and just a few clicks above the Kispiox Indian village. Most of the regulars were already in attendance, their tents pitched on a grassy bar above the river. There was a dentist and a former police chief, a fisheries biologist and a dot-com veteran, a furniture recycler and a professional chef, among others, most of them united by membership in the Northwest Atlantic Salmon Fly Guild. Everyone had another life to return to, but for now they were pilgrims paying their respects at steelhead mecca.

Or maybe pleading at the wailing wall of anadromous fish. Even on the storied waters of the Skeena River system, where the steelhead are all wild and in relatively good numbers compared to their beleaguered cousins in Washington, Oregon, and California, the fishing ain't easy, and I would discover this first-hand.

Once the fish are in the system and they've run the gauntlet of ocean fisheries, bycatch, and in-river First Nations nets, the hopeful angler must worry above all about weather. This is north country and the weather changes its mind like the American electorate in a recession. 

The Kispiox River looks more like a trout stream, with tannin-colored water, rocky ledges, and golden-hued poplars along its bank, yet it is the final destination for some of the biggest steelhead in the world, with record-breaking catches dating back to the 1950s, when reports of huge fish first leaked out to the angling public. Perhaps more enticing, this is one of the few rivers where a greaseliner can have a legitimate shot at a twenty-plus pound steelhead on a dry or "damp" fly, and for many of the anglers with whom I shared camp, the idea of using any other line besides a floating line was anathema.

But I would be casting my floating line on the Skeena for starters. The Kispiox, it turned out, was as low as it had ever been in 70 years of record-keeping. The river was gin clear and the fish ultra-spooky. So we headed for the Skeena, and in doing so encountered some of the classic double-speak (or no-speak) that is typical of the tight-lipped steelheader's world. A conversation in camp might go like this:

"So where are you fishing tomorrow?"

Pause. "Skeena."

"Skeena, huh? Well, it's a little river."

Little like the Columbia. But steelheaders are notoriously secretive and your best bet is to get them liquored up in camp, which I did the next night while serving my Morel Cream Sauce over steaks, thus prying a few flies out of one of our experienced camp mates. Small, drab, sparsely dressed, the flies he gave me looked more like trout flies. The next day on the Skeena I used one of them and discovered what all the fuss was about. I had on my floating line and a 12-foot leader tapered to 10-pound tippet. The tippet worried me but word was you needed long leaders and light lines to hook these fish in such low water conditions. I tied on one of my new flies and started swinging down through a tasty looking run of broken pocket water and boulders, casting a long line and swinging my fly probably no more than an inch or so beneath the surface. Just behind a rock the fish took.

It was on before my brain registered the fact, leaping in the air in an electric vibrating blast, as if trying to sprout wings on the spot: a huge hen with pink shining cheeks. She crashed back into the pool, shards of water catching the light, and broke for the middle of the river. I watched the line fly off my reel, wondering if the drag was set right and whether I'd have a bird's nest on my hands in a second, and then, just before reaching my backing, she was gone. Poof, just like that. I reeled in to find the leader snapped at my tippet knot. My legs had the shakes.

Beedle also hooked into a nice Skeena hen, on a Thompson River Caddis fished in the film, and landed her after a good fight. The next day, with a light rain and the rivers rising, we fished the Kispiox, floating pontoons through some of the hallowed runs: the Potato Patch, Date Creek, the Powerline Hole, and the Gold Room. Below the Powerline Hole I landed a handsome buck (pictured at top).

It rained hard all night and we awoke to find...river out. All rivers out, from the Bulkley to the Kispiox to the Copper. Even the Skeena itself was too brown to fish, and rumor had it that anglers on the Dean River to the south were being evacuated by helicopter.

When forces beyond your control get the upper hand and bully you around, you feel utterly helpless. When life goes sideways or kittywampus, you can curse your misfortune in words that any steelheader will understand. River out!

So we spent a few days exploring the Skeena watershed and tuning into the local mushroom picking scene, which was going through its own river out due to the months-long drought and which no brief rain pulse was going to remedy anytime soon.

Amazingly, the Kispiox ("first to go out, last to come in") actually came back into shape just before our departure, and I got one more crack at a colorful buck, which took me into my backing to the far side of the river and cartwheeled out of the water like a hen before I finally brought it to hand.

As with any pursuit, the detours and back roads are just as noteworthy as the destination. The time in camp telling stories and lies is the real gravy. And we were fortunate to have an old guard steelhead legend among us—his name will be familiar to serious steelheaders, Harry Lemire—sharing his tales of the old days (he quit fishing the Kispiox in '71 because it was too crowded!),  demonstrating fly-tying techniques, and generally being a gem of a guy with a quick wit and generous spirit.

You might wonder what all this has to do with wild foods and foraging. After all, steelhead on the Skeena system are strictly catch-and-release, as they should be to protect a resource that's on the ropes throughout most of its range. My answer to that is that the forager's life is ultimately about connecting with the natural world. Yes, food is a big part of that connection. Yet if you held a gun to my head and had me choose between eating wild foods or merely finding them, I would pick the latter. I love to eat, and learning my way around the kitchen will no doubt be an ongoing education, but it is the time in the outdoors that I cherish above all.

And so these great fish were returned to the river to complete their lifecycle—and perhaps to give some other lucky angler the tug of a lifetime.

Menu for Hope Results

Congratulations to Marie Schall who has won an afternoon of foraging with yours truly—and BIG thank yous to everyone who participated in the sixth Menu for Hope raffle. Food bloggers raised nearly $80,000 for the UN World Food Program. Click here to see a full list of raffle winners.

The Herding of the Pinks

Every other year at the end of August a bunch of friends get together to fish, laugh, and fish some more. We know each other through that most post-post modern of mediums, the Internet chat group, in this case a fly-fishing forum. Too bad Marshall McLuhan isn't around to witness and comment on the forging of such connections. If I could pull an Alvy Singer I would.

Our rallying site adds to the post modern twist: the industrial port of Seattle where the Duwamish River empties into Elliott Bay. Yet this isn't meant to be an ironic sort of fish slumming. As my friend Nope puts it, this is the most democratic of fisheries. Recent immigrants line the riprap, factory workers come out to throw a line during lunch break, and well-heeled anglers in yachts patrol the shipping channels. It's not a scenic place to wet a fly in the traditional sense—it's no Montana as portrayed in A River Runs Through It—but it has its own beauty. This is the grittiest of urban foraging, complete with container ships, trash compactors, big-bellied planes taking off and landing at nearby Boeing Field, cranes swiveling overhead, barges blowing their bullhorns, and a silhouette of stilettoed skyscrapers in the distance. Oh, and the place is a Superfund site.

With pontoons, kickboats, even sketchy rubber rafts, we take to the water armed with flyrods and round up our quarry, the pink salmon. Also known as humpies for the pronounced hunchbacks developed by males in the spawning phase, pink salmon have a two-year life cycle and return to local rivers every other year. Not nearly as esteemed as their bretheren the kings, silvers, and sockeyes, their flesh is less deep red and oil-saturated, so commerically they're mostly used by the canneries. But pinks are good biters, especially on a fly, and their meat smokes up very nicely.

Besides, the pink is a scrappy fish that seems to have taken to the scraps left behind in our devastated world. They're our fish, and we love them. Most pinks around Puget Sound average three to five pounds; those heading up the Duwamish to spawning grounds on the Green River run a little larger. We caught several in the six to seven pound range, including especially large dime-bright females.

Fishing the beaches during a large run is productive, but once the fish converge at the tidal mouths of their natal streams the action can get silly. This is the time to lean on the oars. Like fly-fishing for trout, you put the fly in the ring of the rise and WHAM! Fish on. At the peak you can have fish after fish slamming your fly—a notion that runs counter to most of what you hear about fly-fishing for salmon—and each one puts a solid bend in a 6-, 7-, or even 8-weight rod, towing a kickboat in circles before it succumbs to the net. We herders find a likely corner away from the barges and tugs to circle our wagons. Pinks run this gauntlet at their own peril, especially if my friend Bubba is tossing a line. Bubba has dialed in the Seattle pink fishery in the last decade like no one else and watching him fish is a lesson in humility. (A crack photographer as well, he contributed a few of the shots that accompany this post and video.)



BTW, if someone tells you the pink isn't worth keeping for the table, you smile and nod while you stack that limit in your cooler. I catch enough pinks every other year to take care of all my smoked salmon needs, and the brightest ones hit the barbecue the same day.

Smoked Salmon

It's easy to get worked up about all the possibilities for smoked salmon. You can use 101 different spices, juices, aromatics, etc. But if you catch fish in quantity, as we do during the pink run, you also gain a new understanding of what hunter-gatherer cultures were up against. For the two weeks I actively fished—about half the run—I lost more than a lot of sleep. Fish, work, fish some more, clean and fillet, put the kids to bed, brine the fish, go to bed, wake up and rinse off the brined fish, then fish the morning tide, work, fish until dark, clean and fillet, put the kids to bed, stay up late smoking the first batch and brining the next, haul stinky garbage to curb, try to clean kitchen before wife goes ballistic, sleep a few hours, get up and fish...and so on.

Notice how during that entire two-day cycle I only managed to smoke one batch. With limits of 4 to 6 fish daily (depending on area), we were drowning in salmon. Not that I'm objecting. So the point? Stick to basics. A simple brine of brown sugar, salt, and garlic is really all you need, with a dry brine being easier and less messy than a wet brine.

4 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup pickling salt
1 head garlic, cloves peeled & chopped
black pepper to taste

Mix the dry brining ingredients. Generously cover each piece of salmon (I cut pink salmon fillets into thirds), then place skin-up in a non-reactive dish. Refrigerate for 6-8 hours. The brine will have become a soupy mess after water has been leached out of the fish. Gently rinse off each piece and allow to air-dry on paper towels for a couple hours until a pellicle forms—the tacky (not wet) outer layer of flesh that is so loaded with flavor.

For the actual smoking I use a Weber "Bullet," but it's possible to employ a regular gas grill in a pinch. A water pan is essential for keeping the fish from drying out. For wood chips I like to use fruit trees: apple, or cherry if I can get it. Alder is good too. If not green, the chips need to be immersed in a bucket of water for 30 minutes, then tossed on the coals in handfuls. Everyone has their own theories about temperature and smoking duration. Hot smoking will always be quicker than cold smoking. Because pink salmon fillets aren't thick, I usually figure on smoking for about an hour, even with a small amount of coals, maybe an hour and a half at most.

The last step is vacuum-sealing. I've kept properly packaged smoked salmon in the deep freeze for two years without any appreciable loss of flavor or tenderness.

Blackberry Must & Citrus Cured Salmon

Another option is cured salmon. While making blackberry wine with my friend Becky [future post], her chef pal Ashlyn turned me on to a use for the leftover must, the mashed up fruit that settles on the bottom of the barrel during the initial fermentation phase. Once you rack the wine for the first time, the must is discarded. But Ashlyn suggested I use it to cure fresh salmon. So I did.

2 lb salmon fillet(s)
3/4 cup pickling salt
1 cup brown sugar
1 each zest of a lemon, lime & orange
1 teaspoon peppercorns
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
1 cup blackberry must*

* If you happen to have some blackberry must laying around, by all means use it. If not, the rest of the ingredients make an excellent cure on their own.

Mix all ingredients minus the must in a food processor. Next add the must a little at a time, enough to color the cure but not so much as to make it soggy. Spread a thick layer of cure on bottom of non-reactive dish, up to 1/4 inch. Lay salmon, skin side up, on top of cure, then pack remaining cure on top of the salmon. Cover salmon with plastic wrap and weight down with a few pounds (e.g., cans from the cupboard). Flip salmon in 12 hours. Salmon is finished after 24 hours. Rinse and dry.

The cured salmon will be darker, with an attractive, slightly purple hue from the must, plus there will be a smattering of blackberry seeds that give it extra texture. Slice thinly off the top and eat within a week. I had mine on pumpernickel with a dollop of creme fraiche and chives.

And remember to kiss that first pink salmon of the season. They're the only species of salmon left in the Lower 48 that gives us a hint of what salmon fishing was once like in the not-so-distant past.