This Nordic Food Needs To Be On Your Grocery List

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Nordic cuisine continues to permeate the culinary scene with its focus on foraged and fermented foods. Gravlax is a main staple of the Nordic diet and one of Scandinavia’s most distinctive dishes. It’s salmon that’s dry-cured (not smoked) with salt, sugar and dill. Curing food just means preserving it by drawing out moisture with salt, sugar and nitrates. You’ll usually see gravlax thinly sliced as an appetizer with a dill and mustard sauce.

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This Scandinavian salmon is different than lox and nova lox. Lox is made by salt-curing the belly of salmon. Nova lox, which comes from Nova Scotia, is cold-smoked after curing. Gravlax is prepped with fresh dill, horseradish, juniper berries and pepper. There’s also alcohol used in the curing process like aquavit (a Scandinavian spirit that tastes like caraway seeds) or brandy.

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Gravlax is a luxury food that you can make right at home with a fresh piece of salmon and a short two-to-three-day wait. If you’re making it yourself, which is definitely cheaper than buying it, you can customize it with whatever flavors and aromatics you’d like.

You could cure it with ingredients like beets, gin, cranberries, brown sugar or vodka. Maybe even cure gravlax with pastrami spices and put it on a bagel with cream cheese. If you’re looking for a fun brunch food, try making a pizza with crème fraîche (basically a richer, thicker and less tangy sour cream), gravlax, pickled onions, capers and fresh dill.

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“New Nordic cuisine” is especially known for its experimentation. Fingers point at the pioneering Danish chef René Redzepi for his award-winning Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, and chef Fredrik Berselius’ four-star, modern Scandinavian restaurant, Aska, in New York City.

Nordic food takes inspiration from the eating habits of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. The diet is all about sustainability and eating healthy with cooking methods like smoking, fermenting and curing. You can count on bright colorful ingredients and a combination of sweet, salty and briny flavors. If you’ve had enough of lox, give gravlax a try. You might like the herbaceous style more than the classic smokey kind.