Wild sockeye salmon
- Provenance
- Producer details will appear here when verified.
- History
- The Yup'ik and Alutiiq peoples have smoked this run for at least four thousand years, hanging split sides in driftwood smokehouses above the tide line.
Sealed, numbered and signed by the hand that made it.
THE SEA
Smoked Wild Salmon
Cold-smoked over alder for eleven hours, cured with sea salt and juniper.
$34
Pre-launch
Release notes on the Cellar List.
Pre-launch: we're not taking orders quite yet. Add pieces to your case and it will be held for you — join the Cellar List for first notice when we open.
Cold Cellar / ships chilled
Ships chilled and must be kept refrigerated. Recipes, packaging and validated shelf-life vary by product — final storage and shelf-life instructions will be confirmed on the product label before release.
- Origin
- Producer details will appear when verified
- Batch
- TBC · PRE-LAUNCH
- Pairing
- Blanc de Blancs Champagne
- Batch size
- Made in small released batches
- Keeping
- Ships chilled and must be kept refrigerated. Final storage and shelf-life instructions will be confirmed on the product label before release.
- On the palate
- Silk texture, no chew. Sweet at the front, then juniper and citrus, then a long clean alder finish with almost no salt sting.
Where this dish comes from
Cold smoking is one of the oldest food technologies still practised largely unchanged. Coastal peoples of the North Pacific hung split salmon in alder smoke long before refrigeration existed, and the Sami, the Scots and the peoples of the Baltic each arrived independently at the same logic: salt draws out water, air forms a skin, smoke lays down a preservative varnish.
What began as necessity became luxury in nineteenth-century London, when smoking craft brought from Eastern Europe was applied to salmon rather than herring. That style — light salt, long cold smoke, silk texture — is generally known as the London cure, and is the tradition this side follows.
The London cure belongs to a long line of European cold-smoking traditions, refined over more than a century in coastal smokehouses.
How we make it
Sides are cured skin-on, packed flesh-to-flesh in a mixture of salt and raw sugar. The juniper is cracked rather than ground; ground juniper turns resinous and can dominate the fish within a day.
The pellicle stage matters: a side that goes into the smoker still wet will steam instead of absorbing, and the smoke sits on the surface as bitterness. Sides are air-dried until the surface is tacky and matte before smoking begins.
Dry cure, then cold smoke
36 hours cure · 11 hours smoke
- 01Sides are buried in coarse sea salt, raw sugar, crushed juniper and lemon zest for thirty-six hours.
- 02Rinsed, then air-dried overnight until a pellicle forms and the surface turns matte.
- 03Cold-smoked at 24°C over alder for eleven hours, rotated on the hour.
- 04Rested four days before slicing so the smoke settles into the fat.
Room temperature, sliced on the bias, with rye and cultured butter.
THE INGREDIENT LEDGER
Every defining ingredient, named where we can: what it is, and what it has meant to the people who kept it. Producer and sourcing details will appear here as they are verified.
Alder wood
- Provenance
- Producer details will appear here when verified.
- History
- Alder is the smoke of the north Pacific: low in resin, sweet, and the only wood coastal peoples would let touch salmon.
Grey sea salt & juniper
- Provenance
- Producer details will appear here when verified.
- History
- Salt and juniper together are the oldest northern cure there is — Norse households packed fish in exactly this pair before the winter dark.
Recipes, packaging, storage instructions and shelf-life vary by product and validated production method. Follow the instructions on the label; keep chilled items refrigerated.
