A cure for what ails ya

Prep for smoked salmon, corned buffalo brisket. Yum!

I’m curing.

Not, mind you, in the lame/halt/sick sense of the word. No, I’m using salt and sugar and spices and stuff.

Specifically, I’m double-stacking the curing process in the fridge, with a Pyrex dish of salmon fillets weighted down by a buffalo brisket in another Pyrex dish, weighted down with two bags of dry beans. All sitting on a glass plate, so it’ll catch the drips. We’ll have smoked salmon sometime tomorrow evening, and corned buffalo sometime over the holiday weekend.

Salmon fillets, covered in dry cure.

I just had an urge, though I’d been thinking about corned buffalo for a while. I have two buffalo briskets in the freezer, albeit I can’t find but one of them (they’re small things, only about a pound and a half). So I figured, OK, I’ll corn one of them, because I’m thinking about some smoked salmon, anyway, and if I’m going to get in the notion, I might as well get in the notion.

So first there was the salmon. I had a pound and a quarter package of wild-caught Alaskan salmon I’d picked up a while back at Kroger, with the notion of sous-viding it. I fished about on the web for a bit, and found a recipe on chow.com that looked doable. I altered it a bit, of course.