Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Smoking & Pressure Canning Kings

Well, part of the problem is you are smoking them like white folk. You can't use a smoker like a Bradley or Little Chief and get a light smoke. They are designed to cook as well as smoke.

You need an open smokehouse with lots of space and ventilation for cold smoking.

I have a 4x4x10 smokehouse that I use for both smoking and drying. My smoke generation is done with a #10 can with holes around the bottom of it I punched with an 8d nail. I have a flat steel cover that i use to damper the smoke and regulate the burn.

The can sits on the gravel floor and I open all the vents and louvers on the smokehouse and may even crack the door a tad if there's no wind.

I use fruitwood chips in the can, either apple or cherry. Once I get the chips lit on the bottom with a torch, I cover the can and leave only a 1/4" opening.

But I also smoke mine for a day or more and they hang from 3-5 days depending on weather since I'm kippering most of the time.

For what you are doing, I would only put the smoke on them for a couple hours before taking them down and stuffing them in jars. I would also suggest using cottonwood since you probably have access to it. Use only the white wood, no bark and no heartwood.

When I can kings or any other salmon for just canned salmon, I don't put any smoke on them at all. The only thing that goes into the jar with a fish is a commercial salt pellet.

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.

There's my problem!

That's so racist . . .

I'm pretty basic on my smoker. A plywood box with a barbecue racks, a propane burner and a cast iron skillet full of cherry chips. I do have a thermometer and vents in it. I try to run about 140 degrees when I smoke and if we are canning the smoked salmon, I usually go 1.5-2 hours on the smoke. It always comes out good.

When I filet the salmon I always cut the belly strip off first and then lay off the filets. I use the back portion of the filet for smoking along with the bellies. I add a little of the smoked belly meat to each jar because of the high oil content. An open jar never seems to last long around our house.

Hey, I learned first hand from the middle-Yukon and Aleut folks who've had about 10k years so to perfect things and I haven't found a reason to try and improve them.

I still don't know how to use the commercial smokers.

Maybe a slight display of an koyukon superiority complex, but not racist.

Nice smokehouse Klik.