By Donna Covrett
Photograph by Carmen Nauseef
How is curing salmon like practicing law? Michael Brown, who left a successful 27-year career as a tax and corporate transactional lawyer to start a business making hand-cured, European-style smoked salmon, has the answer.
So how are curing salmon and practicing law similar? You need to be a lawyer to be in food production! The layers of regulations are enough to make my head spin—I don’t know how anyone without legal training makes sense of them. But the real answer is detail. In the legal arena, every detail is important; a good lawyer has to keep track of those details and how they relate to each other. In the cooking and smoking business, every detail affects the product and my customer’s perceptions of the product.
What is “European-style” smoked salmon? It’s much fresher, a much less cured and smoked product than much of what you find in the marketplace. It has the texture of fresh sushi-like salmon. The smoke is very light, more akin to a product that you would find in Scotland than most of what you find in the U.S.
What type of salmon do you use? After lots of research, I settled on farm-raised salmon off the Shetland Islands in Scotland. It operates over and beyond the European standards for sustainable aquaculture, which is important to me. There’s also a considerable difference in quality. If you take a farm-raised Canadian North Atlantic salmon and a Chilean salmon and line them up next to this one I promise you can tell the difference. It’s a prettier product, the texture is more uniform, and it’s a better-tasting product.
What is your method for curing salmon? It’s a very simple, very traditional, very hands-on method that’s thousands and thousands of years old: just salt and a splash of Kentucky bourbon and a few hours of smoking over oak. It’s a two-day process. The bourbon’s natural sweetness offsets the bitterness that the salt contributes, and the oak char from the bourbon barrel matches the smoke I’m using.
FYI Just Cured salmon is available exclusively at Luken’s Poultry and Seafood in Findlay Market or through justcured.com.
Originally published in the September 2008 issue.