Mission: Lox - The Roundup

Sorry, dedicated plate lickers, Ming and Ting have been working a lot! since their smoked fish adventure and have not made time to report back. So here it is. The final, non-authoritative word on lox is in.

First off, I've eaten enough lox that I'm not sure, at this juncture, whether it will be appetizing to me again ever. Will this be a pattern in these research missions, that they will ruin my desire to eat these foods again? Is that irony? Do any of you know how to define irony? I do, in fact, think my relationship with lox will have a future. Today at the sto' (the colloquial term among us hip white people for Whole Foods) I examined a whole gutted rainbow trout for several minutes before I decided that eating only that for dinner would make my apartment and my person smell bad, and that I had no ideas for what to pair it with. After that I left and then I ate some frozen vegetables for dinner. Sweatshops don't pay well.

I digress. What was I talking about? Lox! Barney Greengrass! So I hop off the ol' 1 train and work my way through the labyrinth of Maclaren strollers and these people that is the the Upper West Side, all the while Karen Oh orgasmically screams into my little pink ears that I "look like shit!" and that I wasn't invited. I was feeling real low. And then, like a beacon, I see this through my misty midwestern eyes. A real classic-looking place, right? A serious New York establishment. The kind of place where everything is so good, it doesn't even have to look good.

Now came the moment of truth. Could I ask the guy behind the counter to be my teacher? And of equal importance, would I have the proverbial huevos to ask him for some free samples? Would he beat or banish me if I made a mistake or asked a stupid question? My fantasies aside, the smoked fish man was a wonderfully helpful smoked fish man. I told him "I wanna know about lox" and he was more than happy to help me learn. He told me that their Eastern lox is the most popular. It's brined in water, sugar, salt, and some type of alcohol. Then it's cold-smoked. He told me that it's farm-raised. He offered samples and I took those samples. He also let me try a sample of the Gravlox, the only of their salty delicacies that is made in-house. The Gravlox is never smoked. It is cured, like the regular lox, except with the addition of a LOT of dill and white peppercorns. Awesome stuff.

Then I walked right down the street to Murray's Sturgeon Shop. This was where my most important discovery was made. The man behind the counter decided he couldn't answer broad prompts like "tell me about lox." I told him I didn't know anything about lox so I couldn't ask specific questions. He shrugged his shoulders and left the counter. Then another man came out. He didn't really speak any words to me, but his generosity and his silent pedagogy shone through nonetheless. Through this old-world oracle I learned the answer to my final lox question - who does it best?

The Scotties!!! Yes, Dr. William MacDougal and his feral countrymen know how to cure a fish. The difference? Smoke. "Scotch style" lox, as my maestro explained to me so succinctly in two words, has more smoke. It is cold-smoked for longer than the regular Eastern or Nova lox. That makes a lox that is just as silky in texture, but the saltiness is more in the background and the smoke comes to the front.

Some of you might be saying "NoNoNoah why don't you just go back to Michigan and eat some smoked fish with your backward yooper friends and leave the lox alone!" Well, noone's reading this, not many people know what yoopers are, and even fewer know of their affinity for smoked fish, so you probably aren't saying that. But either way, I am going to leave lox alone. I'm sick of it and this mission. I hope you learned something. Goodbye.

nobear.