Travel-Inspired Cooking Back Home

When I travel, I love to eat something delicious and think about how to re-create it at home. Recently, I had a very simple, memorable salad at Broder Nord, a Nordic restaurant I came across in Portland. The owners run three other Nordic restaurants in Oregon as well, two in Portland—Broder Söder and Broder Café—and one in Hood River, Broder Øst. They all serve dishes with a Scandinavian influence. The salad was made with radicchio—a strong, purple, bitter lettuce—which paired remarkably well with a basic Caesar dressing and crumbled smoked steelhead trout. All I could think about was how well it would work with Alaska salmon.

Back in Alaska, I recreated the salad using smoked salmon, and added rye bread croutons for a robust main dish. I had never done much with radicchio, a hearty form of leaf chicory often used in Italian cooking, but I noticed that it’s almost always in stock in the produce section. It’s my new favorite experimental food. An important tip: soak the leaves in ice water for about a half-hour before using, which takes down some of the inherent bitterness. (Skip this step if you are into that kind of thing.) I combined it with my favorite lazy blender Caesar dressing. This recipe makes a generous amount. You can leave the egg out of the dressing, but the emulsification will not be the same. Smoked salmon’s flavor can be stronger than steelhead’s. If you happen to have smoked trout or cod, you could experiment with those.