Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 11, The Imu, the Camp and the Plate Lunch

Lomi Lomi Salmon

Name: Lomi Lomi Salmon
Total time: 20 min
Yield: Serves 4 to 6 as a side
Cuisine: Hawaii
Ingredients: 300 g salt-cured salmon (or, honestly, good smoked salmon offcuts, worked to remove excess salt, as the nearest UK equivalent); 4 tomatoes, deseeded and finely diced; 1 sweet onion, finely diced; a small handful spring onion, sliced, to finish; a few ice cubes

Hawaii, contact-era, 1830s to 1840s

Lomi lomi salmon, hand worked salted salmon with tomato and onion: a shallow glass bowl of finely diced pale pink salmon mixed with bright red diced tomato and pale translucent onion, a few ice shards visible among the mixture.

Illustration

Time: 20 minutes

Researched: Researched from 66 sources in the brief

Salt-cured salmon, worked by hand in water, lomi means to knead or massage, to leach out the curing salt, then mixed with diced tomato and onion. This chapter places it here rather than among the plantation dishes deliberately: salmon entered Hawaiian waters commercially in the 1830s and 1840s via Hudson's Bay Company barrels shipped down from the Pacific Northwest, decades before the plantation labour migrations that produced the rest of this chapter's fusion dishes, and the technique that turns it into a dish, lomi, is indigenous hand-working, not an imported one.

by Hawaii, contact-era, 1830s to 1840s

Captain Cook's expedition reached the islands in 1778, the first sustained European contact. A far less discussed contact-era arrival belongs directly on this chapter's table: salmon, not native to Hawaiian waters at all, brought in by the Hudson's Bay Company, which opened a Honolulu office in 1829 specifically to sell Pacific Northwest salmon and timber. HBC traded with Northwest Coast peoples for barrelled, salt-pickled salmon and shipped it to Hawaii in real, documented volume, a few hundred barrels a year through the 1830s, 1,530 barrels in 1846, peaking at 2,610 barrels in 1849, before the 1853 smallpox epidemic devastated the Native Hawaiian population and collapsed the market; HBC closed its Honolulu operation in 1859. Lomi lomi salmon, salted fish worked by hand in water to leach the cure, then mixed with tomato and onion, is the result: a genuinely contact-era dish, built on an imported ingredient inside an indigenous technique, and not, this chapter should say plainly, a plantation-era invention despite reading like one of the many creole dishes further down this chapter.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4 to 6 as a side. 20 minutes plus chilling.

Ingredients

300 g salt-cured salmon (or, honestly, good smoked salmon offcuts, worked to remove excess salt, as the nearest UK equivalent)
4 tomatoes, deseeded and finely diced
1 sweet onion, finely diced
a small handful spring onion, sliced, to finish
a few ice cubes

Method

If using genuinely salt-cured salmon, soak and knead it repeatedly in cold water to draw out excess salt, tasting as you go.
Flake or dice the fish finely.
Combine with the tomato and onion, working the mixture by hand, kneading gently rather than simply stirring, which is the technique the dish is named for.
Chill at least 1 hour, with a few ice cubes folded through just before serving for the traditional cold, slightly diluted finish.
Top with spring onion.

What a modern chef changes

The salting and the working treated as two separately controlled variables.

Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung.

Method

Cure your own salmon specifically for this dish, dry-salting a fresh fillet for 2 to 3 hours then rinsing, rather than repurposing commercial smoked salmon, which carries a smoke character the original dish never had.
Dice the tomato and onion to a genuinely fine, uniform size with a chinois-strained tomato water folded back in, for a cleaner, less watery finish than a rough hand-dice gives.
State the substitution honestly: true Hawaiian salt salmon is not sold in Britain; a home-cured fresh salmon fillet is the closer, more honest route than commercial smoked salmon.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists