Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Smoking & Pressure Canning Kings

Fatty kings are the simplest fish to dry and smoke. And cold smoking is certainly the way to do it.

Even if you don’t plan to dry them down, cutting them into strips and letting them dry for a day or so - long enough to harden/gloss over and then smoking in cool smoke for 2-3 hours will be plenty. Smoking fresh/wet fish is part of the problem with smoking them. Fish smoked when it is still wet on the surface seems to pick up bitter flavors quite easily. And how the canned product will be used is a factor.

We don’t can much king salmon except for the ends and belly parts that are simply too fat to make good dry strips. We can those ‘scraps’ and use them later, often with nothing but cream cheese mixed with them, oil and all. It makes a nice ‘horse-ovary’ when applied to Triscuits. Of course you could add some fresh dill, onion, or whatever you like also. But these scraps get the full hard smoke that the strips got so they’re pretty strong, but the cream cheese tames it down quite a bit.