Gravlaks
Fjord salmon cured with dill, salt and sugar until silky and translucent, served with a sweet mustard sauce.
Food-safety callout · Raw cured fish
Read before preparing this recipe
Salt and sugar curing does not cook fish or reliably destroy parasites or Listeria.
- Use fish supplied for raw consumption, with documented parasite controls, or follow the FDA freezing schedule in the linked source.
- A typical domestic freezer may not hold −20°C (−4°F); 24 hours of freezing is not an adequate general rule.
- Keep at 4°C (40°F) or colder. Pregnant, older, or immunocompromised guests should choose cooked fish instead.
Review status: Qualified reviewer pending · editorial safeguards recorded
A named, qualified food-safety owner has not yet signed off. Sources below support the callout; they do not turn this page into a validated commercial process.
Cultural Context & History
The name gravlaks means "buried salmon" — medieval fishermen along the western fjords fermented salmon in the sand above the tide line. The modern version swaps burial for a gentle salt-and-sugar cure, but the principle of transforming raw fish through time and salt endures.
It has become the quiet star of the Norwegian koldtbord, the cold table that anchors every festive gathering from Vestlandet to Oslo.
Ingredients
- 1 kg salmon fillet, skin on, pin-boned150 kcal · 22.1 g protein · 7.1 g fat · 0 g carbs per 100 g
- 80 g sea salt500 kcal · 25 g protein · 25 g fat · 25 g carbs per 100 g
- 80 g caster sugar399 kcal · 0 g protein · 0.3 g fat · 99.4 g carbs per 100 g
- 1 large bunch dill, roughly chopped12 kcal · 0.5 g protein · 0.4 g fat · 2 g carbs per 100 g
- 1 tbsp crushed white peppercorns
- For the sauce: 3 tbsp Dijon, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 tbsp vinegar, 100 ml oil, dill
Per-100 g values shown for ingredients verified against Nutrition data: USDA FoodData Central (snapshot 2026-09-11). Ingredients not yet verified show no nutrition line.
Recommended Tools
- Fish tweezersRemoves pin bones cleanly before curing.
- Non-reactive curing trayGlass or ceramic keeps the cure from tainting.
Product suggestions are editorial references only; no purchase or affiliate links are currently configured.
Step-by-Step Instructions
- 1
Mix salt, sugar and pepper. Lay half the dill on a tray, place the salmon skin-side down, and pack the cure over the flesh with the remaining dill.
- 2
Cover with cling film, weight with a board and tins, and refrigerate for 48 hours, turning once.
- 3
Scrape off the cure, pat dry, and slice thinly on the diagonal.
- 4
Whisk the mustard sauce ingredients until emulsified and serve alongside.
Chef's Tip
Use salmon sold for raw consumption with documented parasite controls. Otherwise follow an authority-validated freezing schedule; 24 hours in a typical home freezer is not a safe general rule.
How this page was made
- Written by
- The Norcook editorial archive. No individual author is named yet — see the editorial and food-safety policy for what that means and what has to happen before a byline appears.
- Content last checked
- — “checked” records an editorial check, not a qualified review. Where one exists, the recipe-specific review record appears in the food-safety callout.
- Regional context
- Vestlandet — the hub carries the wider background, the ingredient glossary and its own sources.
- Sources
- The public-health sources for this recipe are listed in the food-safety callout above. No further page-level sources are recorded yet.
- Notes
- An earlier version of this page carried a 24-hour home-freezing rule for parasite control. It was unsupported and has been removed; the food-safety callout above links the applicable guidance instead.
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