Tried curing my own salmon with beet juice, the color fooled my whole line
Last Saturday I mixed raw beet juice into my dry cure for a 2 pound salmon fillet, and 48 hours later it looked like candy but tasted like a salt bomb. I rinsed it three times and overnighted it in the walk-in, still too intense for the brunch crowd. Has anyone else experimented with fruit juices in cures and ended up with something way saltier than the math said it should be?
Two pounds of fish and 48 hours is not that long for a dry cure to pull salt in, so the beet juice is probably not your problem. Juice adds water back into the fillet, and water carries salt deeper than a dry rub ever will. Think about it: a wet brine moves salt by soaking, a dry cure moves it by pulling moisture out first. You did both at once, so of course it came in hot. Chef Marco at the spot on 5th does a beet cured arctic char and he measures his juice in grams, not by eye, because a quarter cup can throw off the whole ratio. Next time cut your salt by 15 percent and trust the scale.