Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Smoked fish

Northern pike in particular, but any fish in general.

How do you do it?

used to smoke a lot of mullet, but I gave the smoker away several years ago.

Here's your huckleberry..

http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/newsearch?search=fish

Sorry, but that is the biggest group of clueless internet idiots when it comes to smoking fish... and god forbid should you try to explain anything to several of their "special" mods...

I'm willing to learn. What do you suggest?

Thanks,
LD

Leave the skin on the fillets, cut into pieces of your preference.

Brine in cold, cold, cold brine of 1 cup non-iodized salt, 2 cups brown sugar, per gallon of water. boil first to dissolve salt and sugar and then chill.

Brine for 90 minutes, any recipe that says to brine for longer should be tossed. Longer soaks compromise texture and add absolutely nothing. For pike that would be a killer.

Rinse quickly in cold water and place the pieces on the racks. Let a pellicle form. Depending on air movement, temp, relative humidity, and fish it may take several hours. Do not attempt to do it in the frig. Lack of air movement and high relative humidity will slow the process.

Put the fish in the smoker and start at low temp with good, pale blue smoke. I try to keep the temp under 100 or so for the first hour.

Let the heat rise slowly to 140 or so in the smoker and test for doneness after another couple hours. What you want is a good clean flake.

Add all your special sauces, flavors, and incantations to the smoked fish after. That way you can see what truly good fish is about and not be stuck with a big batch of something that does not really make the grade. Good clean smoked fish is hard to beat.

Any particular wood suggestions? What would you use for bluefish or other oily fish?

Pike is a white fleshed fish, I would recommend a mild smoking wood such as alder or a mild fruitwood such as apple. Additionally, with smoke 'less is more' ease into the amount of time actually smoking the product. Beyond this since I only cold smoke I would refer to the methods of those who hot smoke. I concur with the assessment of the smoking meat forum that they do have a lot of worthless information. Bluefish should smoke up just fine.

I pickle my pike , but will post smoked fish recipe later.

I've never smoked fish myself, but I've eaten my share over the years, even some Northern at one point. The problem with Northern is they are a low oil content fish, so as I recalled they turned out quite dry. That's why most of your store bought fish are a high oil content fish, like lake trout, salmon, white fish or ciscoes. Oily fish when smoked produce a nice moist but oily product that I've loved since my parents took me up to the north shore as a kid in the 1950's. Back then, there were smoked fish places all along the scenic drive north from Duluth along Lake Superior. My Dad would get a few ciscoes, fetch a bottle of beer from an old metal cooler and we'd have smoked fish along the shores of the big lake. If you're ever heading for a scenic drive on the north shore there is one must stop place - Russ Kendall's Smoke House. They make the best smoked fish I have ever eaten. They're located just south of the Knife River on the scenic drive.

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For Northern, I would also try pickling them. This is the recipe that seems to be passed around a lot on the fishing forums -

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Walt....I'm glad to hear that Kendall's is still in operation as the old timer would make his rounds through other communities [Grand Rapids] and he had his regular customers.......appeared at the door with a picnic basket full of various smoked fish.....all with a beautiful golden color.

Art has the technique down '''''I just put a bunch in the brine and after I have more coffee and sweep the ash off the porch, I'll put the chunks on the oiled racks to dry a pelicle.

I dont think northern would be a good choice . There is very little oil in the meat like the other poster said. I am smoking up 6 channel cats right now. I soaked in salt for 36 hrs cause I could smoke them yesterday. 12 hrs of brining is enough. I smoke with a bunch of charcoal and a few junks of apple this time but mostly cherry wood. I use chinks about the size of a softball and put them on the charcoal but must be wet wood.after 3-4 hrs @ 200 degrees it works fine. I only smoke Whitebass and catfish.

Do a split batch sometime with fish brined for just 90 minutes and if you do not see a huge difference I will be shocked...

I stay away from freshwater fish. Around Christmas I'll troll up a mess of smallish bluefish and Spanish Mackeral. Clean em up nice and get ALL of the blood lines out of the fillets, remove the skin if you can. Set in brine overnight( salt, brown sugar, bay leaves, peppercorns, dry mustard and Tony's). Wash em real good, put on smoker at 200 with some soaked chunks of what we call water maple. Bout 30 mins and it's done . Don't over do it. Flake it, add some green onions mayo and a touch of lemon juice. Throw it on a cracker with a slice of pickled jalapeño and wash down with a bunch of cold ones. Makes great Gifts, especially when you're a cheap fugg like me

Another thing to consider is previously frozen product(meat, fish) will absorb the brine more quickly than fresh.

How to smoke fish depends on what final product you are after. It can vary from a tender flaky product to a jerkey like product and many iterations in between.

Basic steps are:

1)Brining, using salt, sugar and other spices you are both removing some moisture from the flesh and imparting flavor to the product. Brining can be done wet or dry and depending on how it's done and how it's rinsed you can have a product that has almost no salt all the way to inedibly salty. I've settled on a dry brine as for me I've been able to get a more consistent product.

2)Forming the pellicle. After you have rinsed off the excess salt and after you have dried off the excess moisture you need to allow time for a pellicle to form on the outside of the fish. I put my brined and dried fillets into the smoker, put a small fan in the smoker or at the air entrance to the smoker and let it run 2-3 hours until a pellicle is formed. Don't skip this step!

3) Smoking. The smoke imparts flavor and that's really all it does. It's the salting and drying that preserves the fish, the smoke is really just a byproduct of the heat used to dry the fish. As Pete mentions, go light on the smoke! I've ruined more than my fair share of salmon thinking I had to keep a good smoke going for several days for that traditional smoked salmon product. Wrong! I needed sufficient dry air for the product, just enough smoke for flavor. I prefer either alder or 50/50 alder/hickory.

4) Drying/cooking. In a tradional cold smoke the fish is dried out to a jerky like consistancy. If this is your goal, you need to keep the temperature below 100F in the smoker and really all you need is a few hours of smoking and 2-3 days of running a fan to dry the fish. If you're after a hot smoked product then you'll need to bring the temperature up to a slow cooking point ~180F for 3-5 hours depending on the size of the fish. If the fish isn't cooked long enough it will be mushy, too long it will be tough and rubbery. You will have to experiment with your fish and your smoker.

5) Packaging, unless you've created a properly salted and dried cold smoke product, you'll need to either freeze for long term storage or keep it in the fridge and eat within a few days as with any other cooked fish product. There is also canned smoked fish which if done properly are amazing but my one foray with white fish was not too impressive.

Don't be surprised if it takes a few times to get a product you like, and write down all steps including length of time for all steps so you can tweak as needed or know exactly what you did right so you can do it again.

Mackerel's my preferred smoked fish. Cobia second.

Curious. What does skinning them before smoking do for you?

Personally, I don't like the skin in my fish dip. If I was making a jerky type fish I'll leave it on

Me either.

A little bit of vinegar will take the slime off of salmon. Not sure what you southern boys are smokin. :-)