Recipe of the Month: Carrot salmon

Although Brian and I are eating mostly plant-based these days, we haven't gone full vegan and don't have any plans to. One particular animal food we still occasionally enjoy is fish, which is both healthful and less carbon-intensive than meat. It's also more expensive, so we don't indulge too often, but we buy canned tuna, salmon, clams, and the occasional tin of smoked herring from Trader Joe's; we pick up frozen shrimp and catfish nuggets when they go on sale; and once in a while, we buy a chunk of salmon from H-Mart for homemade sushi.

However, in terms of sustainability, these choices aren't all equal. Fish farms can produce pollution, and natural fisheries can be over-fished, endangering the stocks of fish over the long term. I've always tried to avoid the types of seafood that were most notoriously unsustainable, such as Chilean sea bass, but I recently came to the disgruntling discovery that fresh salmon might not be the best choice either. According to the Seafood Watch website run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, while the canned white tuna and Alaskan salmon we buy are generally "Best Choices" (meaning "well managed and caught or farmed in ways that cause little harm to habitats or other wildlife"), fresh salmon is a mixed bag. There are many different varieties of salmon that comes from many different areas, and only some of them can reasonably be considered sustainable. You can look for the label of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) or the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) to find the best choices, but since the sushi salmon we buy at H-Mart never has any sort of label on it, there's no way to know if it's up to par.

At this point, I could have just shrugged my shoulders and said, "Oh well, we don't eat it all that often anyway." But instead, I started wondering if there might be an acceptable plant-based substitute for raw salmon that would work in sushi. So I started hunting around, and I discovered a recipe for "vegan carrot salmon" on a site called ProVeg. It looked simple enough to make: just cut a big carrot into really thin strips, then marinate it for at least eight hours in a mixture of water, vinegar, salt, Liquid Smoke, and nori seaweed, which presumably would serve to infuse it with a marine flavor. (Actually, we kind of inferred the part about the water; the recipe calls for 300 mL of water, about a cup and a quarter, but the instructions don't actually say where to use it. We assumed it had to go in the marinade because it didn't seem like there would be enough of it to cover the carrots otherwise.) Once it's fully soaked, you're supposed to coat it with oil and a bit more liquid smoke before serving it. It wasn't clear how much like salmon this would actually be, but since we already had all the ingredients on hand, it wouldn't really cost us anything to find out.

So, last week, Brian shaved some carrots as thin as he could get them and soaked them as instructed. And after marinating for two days, we found, they actually looked not unlike smoked salmon. But would the taste, and the all-important texture, live up to the appearance?

To put the carrot salmon to a thorough test, we tried it three ways: by itself, on bread, and in sushi rolls. The sushi came out looking a little wonky, since these thin strips of carrot aren't really the ideal size, but Brian was able to get enough of them in there to make a reasonable roll.

Unfortunately, it was a little hard to evaluate the flavor in this form. The vinegar-flavored sushi rice had a strong enough flavor on its own that the carrot salmon didn't really stand out against it. It definitely didn't taste like carrots, but it was a bit hard to say whether it tasted like salmon.

Tasted by itself, however the carrot salmon was...not unlike the real thing. Without the sushi rice as a distraction, it was clear that this carrot salmon was actually meant to simulate smoked salmon, and it did that surprisingly well. It had the expected saltiness and smokiness, and the nori did, in fact, seem to impart a hint of fishy flavor. The texture, too was better than I expected. It didn't quite have the buttery softness that makes raw or cold-smoked salmon so appealing, but it was  pretty tender, and munching it on a piece of bread was a not-too-bad approximation to eating an actual slice of lox.

So, as a substitute for raw sushi salmon, this stuff wasn't quite ideal. As a substitute for smoked salmon, it was not too shabby, but there was room for improvement. Although the genuine fishy article is quite salty, this stuff tasted even saltier, and I thought dialing down the salt in the recipe would probably improve it. Cutting the strips a tiny bit thinner or marinating them longer might also help eliminate the remaining hint of crunch that tipped off the tongue that the origin of the product was vegetable rather than animal. However, we both agreed that what this salmon substitute really lacked was the fat that gives the original its smooth, melting texture. Adding the oil to it before serving is presumably supposed to remedy this problem, but having oil on the "fish" just isn't the same as having it in the fish.

Brian suggested that serving this carrot salmon in a sushi roll together with avocado might help compensate for its less-than-perfect texture, since the avocado would supply the melting softness you normally expect from the salmon. I wouldn't pair avocado with real salmon, since the textures are too similar, but with the carrot version it would probably work quite well. I also think this vegan salmon could work in any sort of smoked salmon canape that has another, contrasting texture, such as salmon-wrapped asparagus spears. Or we could follow the advice of BBC Good Food and use it in place of the bacon in our favorite spaghetti carbonara recipe. (It still wouldn't be vegan, since it contains eggs, but it would be a trifle more healthful.) All of those would camouflage the telltale texture of the carrot salmon and highlight its smoky flavor. We'll probably have to try at least one of these ideas, since we still have some of the carrot salmon left that needs to be put to use. 

As things stand now, I don't think this carrot salmon is going to become a regular addition to our vegan repertoire. It's interesting as a curiosity, but it's not the special treat that real smoked salmon is, and it's not like we had a whole lot of recipes to try it in. But if it turns out to be particularly good for some other application that we try, I'll let you know.