The Pacific Northwest has always understood smoked fish. Long before European settlers arrived, the Coast Salish people were smoking salmon over alder fires, a preservation technique born of necessity that became a culinary tradition. Scandinavian immigrants recognized kinship with this approach. So did the Japanese fishermen who worked these waters. The smoked trout salad you're about to make carries all of this history, whether you know it or not.

I first encountered this combination at a small restaurant outside Portland, where the chef sourced his trout from a sustainable operation on the Deschutes River. The hazelnuts came from a farm fifteen miles away. The greens grew in his backyard. That's the Pacific Northwest at its best—an abundance so close you can touch it, prepared with techniques borrowed from three continents and made entirely local.

This salad works as a first course at a dinner party or a light main for lunch. The horseradish cream provides heat without aggression. The pickled onions cut through the fish's richness. The hazelnuts offer texture and that particular sweetness Oregon's Willamette Valley produces better than anywhere else on earth. Don't skip toasting them. Raw hazelnuts taste like potential. Toasted hazelnuts taste like fulfillment.

Seek out quality smoked trout. Ask your fishmonger about sourcing. The difference between industrial smoking operations and small-batch producers shows in every flake. This isn't a dish that hides inferior ingredients. It celebrates them.