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How to Salt and Dry Fish

( Update: 05/05/2015 )

How to Salt and Dry Fish When I go fishing, I rarely catch just the right amount of fish for one dinner. Sometimes I don’t catch anything, so I’d go to the general store in disgrace. Sometimes I catch so much that I feel guilty. When I do have a good day, I need to preserve the extra fish for later, less bountiful days. Surely, preserving food is one of the oldest problems facing humanity. Humanity has indeed come up with many ingenious solutions for preserving food, but most of us urbanites know little about the mechanics of these solution except refrigeration. Maybe we should know. Our ability to preserve food, thus smoothing the ups and downs of seasonal cycles and nature’s vagaries into a stable food supply, has made it possible for human population to explode. It’s what made possible for yours truly to emerge out of stardust among one billion other people in China. So you ask, don’t you have a refrigerator? Yes we do. But fish loses its freshness very quickly even in a refrigerator. Freezer? I don’t like frozen fish. Our small freezer is jam packed with many different kinds of berries anyway. So I started to investigate an older and in my view far superior way of preserving fish: salting. Salt preserves fish in two equally important ways: by extracting water from the flesh, and by imbuing it with salt. Through the magic of osmosis, salt crystals accomplishes these two things simultaneously. But it’s important to think about these two mechanisms separately. You see, meat goes bad not because the flesh decomposes by itself. It goes back from the bacteria and microbes that feed on it. The bacteria need water to grow, so if you take away the water, you slow or stop the bacteria’s growth. Many types of food: grain, mushroom, chili peppers, and unsalted dry cod are preserved by drying alone. Meanwhile, salting also increases the salt content of the meat, further creating an environment inhospitable for bacteria. Salt kills bacteria at the cellular level by dehydrating them. Pickling, for example, preserves vegetables in a salty liquid without needing to dry them. When you combine salting with drying, which was first practiced by the Basques, fish can be preserved almost indefinitely. Mummies are preserved mainly by salting using natron then dried. Natron is a chemical salt similar to dietary salt, sodium chloride.