Rounding out the salmon options is kippered salmon, which is hot-smoked at 150☏. Western Nova, which is made with wild king salmon, is leaner and more muscular, with a tighter texture and more assertive flavor than the other styles.
Scottish salmon is a great middle ground “it has a lovely smoke to it, but since it’s a fat salmon, it retains a lot of moisture and silkiness,” says Niki. “Nova” refers to both the geographical location where the fish is caught (Nova Scotia) and a style of smoked salmon, in which the fish is first cured and then lightly smoked.Īt Russ and Daughters, you’ll find the luxe Gaspe Nova - with a “marbling and fattiness that give the salmon a silky quality” - along with Scottish salmon and Western Nova. To Niki, the “quintessential smoked salmon”-“what you think of when you think of New York–style smoked salmon” - is Gaspe Nova, or Nova for short. If someone over a certain age asks assertively for belly lox, we’re not going to question him or her, but most people end up wanting one of our seven varieties of smoked salmon.”ĭo you hear that, folks? What you probably enjoy eating on your bagel is smoked salmon, specifically cold-smoked salmon - not lox. “People will constantly come in and ask for lox, and it sometimes requires a little back and forth to find out what they’re actually looking for.
The taste of true lox is incredibly salty and assertive “we think bagels with lox was invented because belly lox needed bread and dairy to cut it,” says Niki. (Like gravlax, which is cured in sugar and salt, there’s no smoking involved.) It’s the version of preserved salmon people ate before refrigeration was widely available salmon from the Pacific was hauled across the country in gigantic salt baths, and fed to the Jewish immigrants of New York before a morning at shul or a long day of work. Lox - or “ belly lox,” which is the actual name for it - is salmon that has been cured in salt. Hot-smoked salmon has a completely different texture - meaty and flaky, like cooked salmon.” Cured salmon has a similar texture, but without any smoke flavor. According to Niki, “cold-smoked salmon is the stuff that can be sliced so thin you can read the Times through it. Smoking is a process in which a food is exposed to, well, smoke - with a “cold-smoke” for salmon happening below 85☏, and a “hot-smoke” for salmon happening above it.
Curing is a process in which a food is preserved in salt (and sometimes additional flavorings/aromatics). There are two major cooking processes in play when discussing the salmons of the appetizing counter: curing and smoking. Luckily, Niki Russ Federman, the fourth-generation owner of Russ and Daughters, is here to talk us through it. That “bagel and lox” you eat on Sunday mornings… might not be a bagel and lox. But even being a New York Jew does not make you pre-programmed to know the differences between lox, Nova, and smoked salmon. You probably know a Jew or two - you might even be a Jew yourself. My dear readers, this might be one of those times - buckle up. Sometimes, some things are such a part of the fabric of our lives and our history and our surroundings that our sense of rightness about a certain topic feels almost innate.
THE LOX HAT FULL
Eater will be publishing all editions that parse food-related differences, though those hardly scratch the surface of the world’s (and the newsletter’s) curiosities: Sign up to get What’s the Difference? in your inbox or catch up on the full archive. This post originally appeared in an edition of What’s the Difference?, a weekly newsletter for the curious and confused by New York City writer Brette Warshaw.
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