Bagels with Smoked Salmon & Whitefish Salad
- By Katie Roche
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- 22 May, 2020
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This is the story of how I found myself at Whole Foods of a Monday morning, buying an entire fish. I had been eyeing this recipe nervously for a few weeks, doing research on where to buy smoked whitefish and coming up with nothing. I asked my friend who is a butcher which prompted a whole conversation about how to go about smoking a fish in one's own grill. I asked my friend who is a boss at smoking meats. We also had a conversation about smoking in grills. I went to Whole Foods once and didn't see anything that looked like what I found online. I looked online - the cheapest I could acquire 2 pounds of smoked whitefish for was about $100. I talked to my friend Courtney, who told me Whole Foods smokes fish, and might be willing to smoke a white fish for me. Finally, my eternal food sensei/best friend Merra suggested that it might be with the canned fish at a fancy grocery store like Whole Foods. All realistic answers seemed to begin and end with Whole Foods so I took another trip. Resigned to buying a white fish and figuring out how to smoke it, I approached the fish counter and asked the employees if they had heard of smoking white fish, and what kind of fish should I use, etc. It turns out, they had it the whole time and I just didn't know where to look. They handed me what you see in the picture above. Now, I was very skeptical. For one, I don't like that it's called "whitefish" and that that term encompasses the variety of white fishes there are. It's like when you look at some dairy product and it's labeled as containing "cheese food". Like is it or is it not cheese? How is there a way that it's LIKE cheese but isn't? That is disturbing. So holding this, I mostly just wanted to know: WHAT KIND of fish is this? And why won't it say???
While in the Whole Foods, I ran into my friend Teal who saw the fishmonger guy handing me this whole fish in its packaging and she was just like, "Of course you're in Whole Foods at 9 AM on a Monday buying that. Like OF COURSE YOU ARE." I would hate to ever be thought of as boring, but I would also maybe like to set straight any notions that all of my grocery trips are that ridiculous and bougie. They are not. Sometimes I go to the store just for Polar seltzer. I'm normal, mostly, I promise. One of my very favorite parts of the whole experience was the girl at the checkout bagging groceries who picked it up, looked at me, and said, "Are you gonna cook this? It has, like, an entire eyeball in there."
While in the Whole Foods, I ran into my friend Teal who saw the fishmonger guy handing me this whole fish in its packaging and she was just like, "Of course you're in Whole Foods at 9 AM on a Monday buying that. Like OF COURSE YOU ARE." I would hate to ever be thought of as boring, but I would also maybe like to set straight any notions that all of my grocery trips are that ridiculous and bougie. They are not. Sometimes I go to the store just for Polar seltzer. I'm normal, mostly, I promise. One of my very favorite parts of the whole experience was the girl at the checkout bagging groceries who picked it up, looked at me, and said, "Are you gonna cook this? It has, like, an entire eyeball in there."
The longer I look at it, the more I realize that this picture represents a lot of people's food nightmares. We've got all the heavy hitters of hated foods: fish, more fish, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. In the back there, you see celery which I personally wouldn't say that I HATE but I really do not enjoy. The texture...just so STRINGY. Ick. Onion, lemon, and bagel are really holding it down for us all here. Cream cheese is probably somewhere in the middle - I know people who hate it and I know people who love it. Clearly, this all has the makings for something very odd.
Dan began skinning the whitefish and the skin peeled off so easily, he said it was like "a rotisserie chicken-fish". That description makes me a lil uncomfortable, as does the actual kind of rotisserie-chicken-color of the fish skin. He sorta kinda flaked it into a bowl for me and we each took a bite. I have exactly one descriptor for it: SALTY. And if you've eaten with me and seen the way I salt food, if I call something salty, that is SAYING SOMETHING.
Being added in with the fish here, we have celery and red onion so far. Celery is not something I would usually think of to eat with fish. It's more a sad children's picnic food. What is up with "ants on a log" anyway? Like, it just seems like something adults made up to try to be clever but would any of those adults be willing to eat it themselves? If you say yes to that, you are a liar. You've never once wanted celery, peanut butter, and raisins all in your mouth at once. Full disclosure, I just drank a margarita a little too quickly and I've kind of had a day, and the rest of this might be coming from that headspace, whatever that headspace actually is.
Whew, ok, I had an interlude during which I ate some enchiladas and shot some pucks and now I'm back and feeling a little better. I ALMOST beat Logan at the shooting game we were playing (it's basically HORSE with hockey pucks) but I didn't, so now I'm back to work. He needs a break from the pressure of me closing in, honestly. So! Back to food, I was juicing a lemon here to add to the fish salad, and at this point in the process I was feeling grateful for lemon because this thing seriously needed some acidity. I could just tell already that it did, because of how salty the fish was.
Is this the stuff of your nightmares? Mayonnaise-y fish salad? It vibes a lot like the concoction most of our moms probably made with tuna. If you're Dan, you'd have swapped out the onion for apples, yes, APPLES. With FISH. Please do feel free to call him out for how weird that is. I recently had a whole conversation about tuna mix-ins with one of my hockey friends who's a bit older and not only was he okay with apples in tuna, he also said he sometimes likes grapes in there. Old people TRULY have affected palates. They eat some very strange things sometimes, like that standard Old Person candy, Werther's Originals. I appreciate, too, that Werther's KNOWS who it's marketing to - they had hella commercials during Price Is Right right along with all those 1-800 numbers for Medicare. I am having a very hard time staying on track.
Ok first, before I post a pic of the whitefish salad bagel, here is the smoked salmon, cream cheese, and tomato bagel. Ina called for a pound of "thinly sliced" smoked salmon, but if you know me, you're 0 surprised that I pulled a jar of my dad's smoked salmon from the pantry and just used that instead. None of Ina's fancy friends will ever make better smoked salmon than my dad does, and even if they did, they wouldn't have such a freaking good time hanging out with my dad catching said salmon on the Kenai River in the summers. Some of my best memories are of long days spent on the beach, shivering with cold and working together with my family and friends to catch all that fish. This smoked salmon has that intangible taste that memories always give food.
Ina's actual intro to this recipe goes into how she found out years ago that toasted bagels "tasted to much better when they're sliced in thirds instead of halves". She says every time she serves them this way to company, they comment on it. YOU. GUYS. Of all the ridiculous things she's said in this book, I think this one might take the cake. To be honest, I was unable to verify her statement because I do not live anywhere fancy or cool enough to sell bagels that aren't pre-sliced and in a bag of six, but I truly believe her company is commenting on her bagel thirds in more a passive-aggressive way like, "oh isn't that charming" really meaning "this is so dumb, why can't you just leave bagels alone".
I dropped off some of this whole setup for my friend Cam, whose thoughts were that 1) the bagel I chose was amazing (egg bagels from Kroger - believe me, I'd have gotten better ones if it were possible but it's not, not in South Carolina) and 2) that the whitefish salad was basically forgettable tuna. Dan, like me, was mostly just off-put by the fact that he saw the fish when it was whole and in its packaging and kept thinking about that visual while eating it. I know that is strange, because not only do we see our salmon whole but we see them ALIVE and actually kill them ourselves but this hit different. The liquidy nastiness of a vacuum-sealed, unidentified fish is just a lot to contend with, even after you've skinned it, flaked it, and mixed it with mayo. Personally, I was unimpressed. The whitefish tasted to me like what would happen if you stirred all your fish together INTO a tartar sauce and ate it. But like, not really in a good way.
Fish for breakfast is a risk. If it's something that sounds good to you, go with her gravlax recipe from way earlier in the blog which was actually a HUGE hit. Miss the whitefish salad - it seriously is like serving someone tuna for breakfast and I don't know about you but I've never once woken up and been like, "you know what would pair super well with my locally-roasted coffee? Some tuna."
I dropped off some of this whole setup for my friend Cam, whose thoughts were that 1) the bagel I chose was amazing (egg bagels from Kroger - believe me, I'd have gotten better ones if it were possible but it's not, not in South Carolina) and 2) that the whitefish salad was basically forgettable tuna. Dan, like me, was mostly just off-put by the fact that he saw the fish when it was whole and in its packaging and kept thinking about that visual while eating it. I know that is strange, because not only do we see our salmon whole but we see them ALIVE and actually kill them ourselves but this hit different. The liquidy nastiness of a vacuum-sealed, unidentified fish is just a lot to contend with, even after you've skinned it, flaked it, and mixed it with mayo. Personally, I was unimpressed. The whitefish tasted to me like what would happen if you stirred all your fish together INTO a tartar sauce and ate it. But like, not really in a good way.
Fish for breakfast is a risk. If it's something that sounds good to you, go with her gravlax recipe from way earlier in the blog which was actually a HUGE hit. Miss the whitefish salad - it seriously is like serving someone tuna for breakfast and I don't know about you but I've never once woken up and been like, "you know what would pair super well with my locally-roasted coffee? Some tuna."
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!