Australia is blessed with great fresh seafood, but don’t overlook the excellent and convenient preserved and smoked seafood in many classic recipes. Try these preserved and smoked seafood recipes.
Smoked seafood, such as salmon and mussels, contains the same healthy omega3 oils and nutrients as fresh seafood. It’s a convenient way to get the health benefits of eating seafood.
Preserved seafood, such as canned tuna and sardines, contains the same healthy omega3 oils and nutrients as fresh seafood. It’s a convenient way to get the health benefits of eating seafood.
Since ancient times, seafood has been preserved by being cured with salt, pickled with vinegar or smoked over fires. Potting, packing seafood into a dish and covering it with a layer of fat has also been a popular way to preserve seafood for centuries. Canning or bottling seafood, often immersed in oil, came later.
Curing and pickling are both ancient ways of preserving seafood. Pickling usually involves covering food in vinegar, often with salt, sugar and various herbs and spices for flavouring. Curing refers to treating a food with dry salt, often also with other flavourings added.
There are two basic methods of smoking seafood:
Cold smoking, here fish is immersed in smoke so that the flavour penetrates the flesh, but at such a low temperature (usually below 26ºC) that the flesh remains raw, as is seen in sliced smoked salmon.
Hot-smoking where, after the fish is cold smoked, the temperature is raised and the fish is then cooked in the smoky environment. The flesh of hot-smoked fish (such as smoked rainbow trout) looks cooked.
