To Smoke a Fish

I know, it's been months and months without an update - and I choose to write about smoking fish?! So much has happened over the summer, it almost seems trivial to try to sum it up...but documenting my efforts at smoking fish for the first time, now THAT I can do!

Catch fish. Fillet them. Vacuum seal. Freeze. Now what? We don't own a smoker!

My very first effort, and this is what I did. I'm hoping to modify as I go, so I  need to take good notes!

Smoked Sockeye, Take #1:
Used 2 tail-end fillets, a little larger than palm of my hand, about 1" thick at the thickest. Didn't want to experiment with our bigger beautiful chunks of fish!

Brine:

Found a simple "recipe" online at WWW.SMOKER-COOKING.COM. There are a million variations, but I wanted to keep it simple. I used:

• 1 quart water
• 3/8 cup brown sugar
• 3/8 cup canning (pickling) salt
• 2 chopped cloves of garlic

Put salmon in brine, and let soak for about 3 hours in a bowl in the fridge. Afterwards, I pulled them out and dried them overnight, about 10 hours. I don't have any good racks for drying, so I just put them in the over (kept the oven OFF, and closed, so the dogs wouldn't get to it!). Supposedly the brine allows the fish to dry at room temperature without spoiling. Rest assured, the fish did not smell or look bad in the morning! It did develop the "pellicle" I kept reading about - a slightly tacky coating left by the salt once it dries. Supposedly this helps the smoke adhere to the fish?? Sure!

Smoking:

This was the tricky part, since we don't own a smoker and only have a broken propane grill. Yes, the propane part is broken... but I figured I could still use the grill itself to set up a charcoal smoker. I bought some charcoal briquettes; however, I have read some stuff afterwards that lump coal is the preferred material, due to better flavor and less additives. Oh well! I set up charcoal on one side of the smoker, lit it and let it sit and burn for a bit. Next time, I think I will let it sit a little longer because I don't think I had them going quite evenly enough.

Once the coals were going, I threw some alder wood (soaked shortly in water) onto the burning embers. The idea is that you keep the coal and wood on one side of the grill, then put the fish on the opposite side to get the indirect heat. Once the wood was smoking (didn't take long), I put the fish on and closed the lid. And waited...and waited...

Just kidding. I did have to mess the with coals to get it a little hotter, and add more wet wood chips every 30 minutes or so. If I had gotten dialed in with the coals better, I probably could have minimized the time opening the lid, and having to move the grate aside to deal with coals. For the first 2 hours, the temperature was about 200 degrees. It was smoking the fish, and I had thought 2 hours would be long enough, but I was aiming for an internal temperature of about 140 degrees for the fish (as I had read online). The last hour, I added coals and blew on them for a bit to get them hotter, and the temperature reached 225 - and the fish reached 140. It sure LOOKS good... Now for the taste test!

Taste:

Yum! It tastes like smoked salmon! Now, here's the catch - I'm not like, a smoked salmon expert. I don't know if I prefer it less or more salty, or wetter or drier, or whatever. It's definitely edible and made me happy. It is a bit salty, but I enjoy salty foods. It's on the dry side of smoked, so next time I will try to make some more moist fish and compare. Time to put it on a cheddar jalapeno bagel with cream chease!