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

Just got some whole sockeye from great alaska seafood company and looking for a good recipe to smoke one or two of them.

I do a lot of salmon from the great lakes. This is a good and simple recipe. You want to taste the salmon so too many ingredients wreck the fish.

1. 4 cups water
2. 1 cup soy sauce
3. 3/4 cup brown sugar
4. 1/4 cup kosher salt
5. 3/4 tablespoon granulated garlic
6. And any aromatics you are a fan of

After brining overnight, rinse, put the fish on the rack plan to smoke them on and pat dry with paper towel. Wick up ant fluids in pockets. Then set the fish in from of a fan. You want to develop a pellicle. (this is important if you want a quality product)

Drying the fish before smoking gives a nice coat for the smoked fillets to help seal in moisture, and provides a better looking finished product . This will take 30 to 45 minutes.
Smoke as long as you like (everybody has a different idea of firmness/dryness but the fish should spend at least 30 minutes at 160 degrees. Too hot and too fast and the fish will form mucky yellowish pools of goo in cracks in the fish. Low and slow is best. Im a fan of smoking with the skin on to keep the fish moist. I like a very dry product. It flakes best and makes a good spread on crackers when mixed with cream cheese and Miracle Whip and chives and a dash of "Whats-in-this-here-sauce".

Do yourself a favor and use hickory, Maple or alder. A thin blue smoke and several hours.

Rylee, here ya go. Lards recipes, simple and excellent!

I've used both a wet brine and a dry rub and prefer a dry rub consisting of salt and brown sugar. Some like to add other spices (onion powder, garlic, pepper, etc.), but I keep it simple. I've seen recommendations for equal parts salt and sugar to 1 part salt / 2 parts sugar (which is what I use). Completely cover the flesh side of the fillets stacking them if needed and refrigerate. Some say 2 -3 hours is long enough, but I do it overnight which pulls out a lot of moisture. Rinse the fillets and let dry on a rack (I go around 4 hours), then I smoke at 150 - 170 for 2 - 4 hours.

Yep, or



Linky: https://heygrillhey.com/hot-smoked-salmon-maple-orange-glaze/

sharp_things

Your recipe looks like a great one for brining and your fish looks wonderful in the pics.

But Miracle Whip? On such good fish?

THE HORROR!!

Please, you shouldn't be posting that for newbies to the smoked salmon game!

Geno

PS Oh well, to each their own I guess. Just pullin' your chain.

rylee 1,

not sure if you have access to alder, but I love it for smoking fish.

Generally, I just do a quick rinse in rather salty water, pat dry, let dry a bit more, then smoke over alder wood. maybe a medium heat smoke. No overnight brining, no sweet or vinegary stuff.

I prefer the taste of the fish just as it is.

Thousands of "Native American" or "First Nations" folks did it that way for thousands of years. I've found it good enough for me.

Geno

PS, I eat a lot of raw fish, so you may want to take my tastes into consideration!

The MW is for a cracker spread AFTER the fish has been smoked. MW pretty much makes everything better.

sharp,

MW as you call it, should never have been brought into existence!

Not even for cracker spread.

and it's worse that the cracker spread involved some nice fish.



Geno

Not everybody has such refined tastes. Some people actually tolerate mayo. Hahahahahahahaha. (aka donkey splooge)

Perhaps some have not done something worthy of treating themselves to the tangy zip of Miracle Whip.

I know a person who did water tests on all the great lakes " all 5 " Michigan lake has a lot of human feces in the lower half of that lake so I won`t eat salmon from that lake anymore "ICK",but if its from lake superior its fine. but the finest tasting salmon I have ever ate is from Alaska.

"The main difference between Miracle Whip and mayonnaise are the sweeteners: high-fructose corn syrup and sugar are the fourth and fifth ingredients, respectively, of Miracle Whip."

Yeah, that makes me wanna gag !





"On the surface, Miracle Whip seems to be a healthier choice than mayonnaise because of its reduced fat content. However, an argument can be made that it is more processed and less natural than mayonnaise. The ingredient list includes modified food starch, artificial color, high fructose corn syrup, and potassium sorbate."

http://www.howstuffcompares.com/doc/m/mayonnaise-vs-miracle-whip.htm

You don't have to sell me on MW. Im already a fan.

Another thread pissed on by the saggy eyed douche.

No doubt. Only person ive ever had in ignore. Thread is littered with the ignore tag.

It is alotta nicer only person I’ve ever had on ignore as well.... hopefully rick will pull the plug pretty quick

I like Miracle Whip. Shoot me.

Yeah. I don't care what other goofs think. (never have. This should have been made clear by now)

We got guys that eat schit like mayo and grits and okra and biscuits and gravy and other non-food items trying to convince folks mayo is food. (like I would give a damn)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Don't waste my time with the pouting either. Aint nobody go time for that.

Like dealing with a bunch of teen girls.

When I gave the guy the definitive smoked fish instructions the thread was over at that point. There wasn't a need for any other posts so I told him how to make a salmon spread using some of the smoked fish and twats got all twatty.

sharp,

Gettin' pretty testy there, eh? All over your favorite (?) condiment.

Not to worry, I'd probably eat the MW if I needed to make a tuna sammich and there was no mayo in the fridge.


Now, back on topic:

Your smoked fish instructions were quite definitive. I hope the OP tries them and gets back to us to let us know how it went.

If we should ever meet, I'd try your version for sure.!

Geno

Actually Geno, it's a less-than-ideal brine and pics of overcooked, baked fish sticks.

Simple brine is best.

1 - 1 1/2 cup noniodized salt (depending on salt preference)
2 cups sugar
1 gallon H2O

Mix brine and put in freezer until VERY cold, then brine fish.

90 minute soak.

Remove; rinse & drain; put on oiled racks skinside down. Blot dry. Allow pellicle to form.

Smoke to preference. use only alder for smoked salmon.

Some salt, sugar, pepper, and maybe some soy sauce. There are may recipes that would have Martha Stewart rummaging in the pantry and wine cellar for hours to scrounge all the ingredients. The subtleties of 28 herbs and spices pretty much get lost after a little smoking. The KISS principle applies.

I remember my sister's Easy Bake Oven. It looked like that tiny aluminum mail box. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Nice looking jerky / chips but yours is way to dry. We are talking about smoked fish (salmon), not chips. I'll bet that batch fed 1 person . I can just hear them brittle bites snap and crunch as you eat them. HAHA.

Funny;

This........



does not look anywhere near as "baked" as your Schidte !



Ya fuggin Knob !

Yes, you really are dumber than you sound. Those salmon were out of this world. Moist and firm and sweet with great smoke. You should try smoking fish once. Its a lot of fun.

What a douche. Speaking of that, you may want to use a brine made if vinegar and water. (akin to something you would use on a summer's eve)

Iron bender.....could a person buy some salmon from the store and smoke it in the fashion you have shown here?

Gotta love those Chief smokers. Cheap, practical design that has been around forever getting the job done. Need to find me another one at a garage sale or flea market.

The Alaskan for the win.

It really is just as simple as a brown sugar and canning salt brine, and alder smoke.

I run a fan on the flapper door where you load in the wood chip pan for a few hours to help the pellicle form, then find 5 hours with one full pan of chips does the trick.

I don’t see why not Jim. Salmon available in Blaine Co. ?

They don’t t have the “cool factor” perhaps, but they get the job done.

After all, it’s about the technique.

Thanks Paul.

As you know, and for full disclosure, the recipe I posted is from Sitka deer.

I used to struggle with the brine concentration vs time previous to that. It was always edible, but no batch-to-batch consistency. Some were better than others.

That method nails it perfectly every time.

Agreed.....regardless of whether it's stamped aluminum or a wooden contraption made by a blow hard it's just a box to contain smoke.
I had a chief smoker that served me well for 20+ years until it finally died and now that I'm on my sausage making adventure I'm sure I'll eventually end up with another one. The only problem I had with mine was trying to use it outside in the dead of winter but that's hardly a big deal.

Here in the greatest of the 50 states it gets dam cold and I do a lot of smoking in the winter months so that "excellently designed, wooden marvel as you called it, incorporates lots of insulation. That disposable aluminum mailbox thingy (aside from being far to small to bother with) is not insulated. It sure is cute though, Almost like a real smoker. Something that a city boy would use to smoke a small snack.

Foil backed insulation is what I used on mine in the winter when I had my last one in the 90’s.

Just made my own blanket that slipped over and had cut outs, flaps in the right areas.

Thanks for the info dick head.
I'm sure that since IB lives in Alaska a Wisconsin yankee can teach him a lot about cold weather.

Clearly. Based on the easy bake oven he made those jerky/chips in, he can use some guidance. Thats the first time Ive see fish flavored fruit roll-ups.

Age-old method - save the box and invert it over the smoker. People have been doing that since Chiefs were developed. I've smoked into the single digits.

Of course losers will bluster attempting to not lose. Unsuccessfully, if only obviously.

And another thing. When a brown bear tears it apart, there isn't a large investment lost.

good smoking size. a few miles out. This would fill a few easy bake ovens.

rylee1-
Please report back your results.

Sorry the poacher hijacked the thread.

Nothing says "nasty dry salmon" quite like the denatured protein globs in the badly mistreated example. Every little glob brought lots of water out of the fish with it and then the water evaporated.

The beautiful glossy pellicle in the other example proves the proteins stayed locked inside the fish keeping it moist and perfect. That is exactly what smoked salmon is supposed to look like.

Bragging about a box capable of ruining more salmon at one time than a perfectly functional unit is both humorous and sad.

In a serious salmon smoking competition the judges would not even bother to taste the over-cooked garbage.

You learn well, Grasshopper!

And that pic you posted of yourself shortly after Rick foolishly allowed you back on this site was the first time I ever saw a dick with ears.

Life's full of firsts.....you know.....like your first BBC.

"Pellicle" is the missing word...

Too much heat killed any possibility of an acceptable product.

The Summer's Eve just kills me! Crying!

Friends and family thank you!

Yes I explained that to the OP in the first post. Others then linked other peoples work that mentioned it.

I think iron benders brittle fish jerky might still taste ok but one would wear out there chompers eating it.

I like these for smoking/grilling but it would take several of the easy bake ovens to do just one.

No one with the first clue about smoking salmon would take you seriously. You are wrong at every turn and making lots of noise does not help your case. Your smoked salmon sucks, period.

BTW, your fish handling techniques may possibly be worse than your smoker techniques, hard to believe, but possibly.

Cool story. Wrong but still cool anyway.

Normally I hold them by my teeth but thats not fit for the interweb.

Cool, thanks.

Kinda funny, but yes....for a while we had fresh salmon in Blaine County!


The Huttes built a salmon farm up north of town.

The salmon came to town and it was cheap and cheerful!


The Huttes lost their assess on the deal and quit after one year.



Now we have to buy halves from Walmart....for shame!


They are "fresh" sides.....could you use frozen??

Actually, frozen is preferred.

Freezing kills parasites and after thawing, it takes the brine more uniformly. Again, via personal communication w/ SD.

Was talking about your processing "technique" creating all of the breaks in the fillets. I could tell you what you are doing wrong but since you obviously choose not to listen I will save my electrons...

Ahhh....thanks again IronBender!

Also, just because I entered this thread, don't confuse me with an expert.

I'm just smart enough to ask questions instead of offering bad answers; and have learned from others.

Member 'pak' is the ultimate authority here on smoking fish.

Agreed.

I do mine a little different, doesn't mean someone else's is wrong. Unless they are that idiot that ruined a perfectly good batch of fish you probably aren't supposed to eat in the first place. One meal a month isn't worth bothering with. Mine comes out looking almost exactly like IB's and people rave over it. So much so that now they have started dropping fish off so I can smoke them.

BTW, you can fit 5 adult coho into a Big Chief smoker, only done it more times than I can count.

Yup. Some prefer dry brine with good results.

As far as capacity, don't confuse the DSMFer with facts!

Heavy metals take their toll, if only obviously...

I have a 76 Little Chief top loader and some alder chips.



I will now go hunt me some fish....

I see a 'smoked fish farmin' video in the future!

Perhaps some "foder"

hahahahahahahahahahaha.

By the looks of you these days, this was atleast 15-20 years ago! Lmao

Regardless of age he always looks like a dick with ears to me.

You are hooked on the human penis. Seems odd to me but if thats your thing, enjoy.

When he starts off with brilliances like "good smoking size" you have to wonder what a "bad" smoking size would be...

Not really but I do know a dick head when I see one.

Actually was referring to big Jim's series of ".... farmin" videos.

Oh, missed them.

IB,

I love smoked fish...............especially if it's free. And I did say I'd try it, but not how many times. That would depend on taste more so than texture, which does enter into the equation tho.

I cannot agree more with you about the choice of wood for salmon. If available, alder is the only one, therefor no choice at all.

As to the wonders of smoking in a Little Chief, Big Chief, Youngster Chief, Wooden box, and so on, I'll use what's available. When I was a poor starving student in NorCal my landlady had an old dead refrigerator out back. I took a look at it one day and found out it was just a shell. An ex boyfriend had gutted it down to the sheet metal, fitted it with some racks, and turned it into quite the passable smoker. It held a bunch, that's for sure. And it operated on the principle of an old Weber or some such kettle in the bottom into which a good dose of alder chunks was burned to coals, the racks filled, more soaked alder chunks added to smolder, the door shut, and then good scheidt would come out.

When I moved up the hill after graduating and finding my woman, the landlady was nice enough to let me take the smoker. Wal-Mart and Winco would have turkey wars around the holidays, like the old gas wars. Prices would drop, sometimes daily, as a loss leader. One season they got down to $0.12 cents a lb!! A starving student/new graduate with loans to pay back, can buy a good bit of turkey at that price..............I did! Whole smoked turkeys were a mainstay during the holidays, the carcasses turned into soup of course.

I did a bunch of albacore while there also, as it was cheap buying it directly from the guys at the docks, no middlemen of course. One batch was deemed so good, it went with me to a Thanksgiving dinner pot luck..........................there was turkey left over but no albacore and folks were asking where they could get more.

A few salmonid types were done on that thing also. Perhaps some of the tastiest fish were herring from a class collecting trip. When I asked the professor (My advisor) for some to take home, he asked what for. When I told him I loved kippers but had never smoked herring for myself he said grab a bucket and bring me back some! As an aside, my advisor called me the "optimal forager" as I was seen on multiple occasions gathering mussels and barnacles from the rocks below the marine lab, along with other goodies anywhere I could. Free food is manna from heaven for starving students.

Brine? Simple is best, and the one I posted earlier is as simple as I can get it. A short soak in some salty water works for me. I have nothing against the sweeteners or the soy types, but I like my fish the way the Natives did it for thousands of years, alder smoked and not much more.

I will admit, you Alaskan fellas know your fish for sure. I had many wonderful meals from the locals when I worked in SE for a year or so. And my little Jr Weber worked in a pinch too.

I like smoked fish, especially salmon, so much I've tried it everywhere I've seen it. I certainly would try sharpies stuff, preferably pre-Miracle Whip, and you guys' too. Hell, I even tried ciscos from a little place in Dunkirk NY and would love to have some again.

I've said it before on the 'fire.....My favorite fish??.....................the one that's on my plate.

Please forgive me for my lack of discriminating tastes when it comes to smoked fish.

Geno

Small ones, (those are cooked and eaten as the slabs are too thin and yo end up with crispy chips like iron benders mistake)

Really huge ones (those are canned) and we make salmon patties, etc. with those.


This isnt that hard folks. When you have access to a lot of salmon, you use them in lots of ways. Just smoking them is akin to doing it wrong when there are so many way to enjoy salmon.

It left out clueless... otherwise it is perfect.

Its cute when you try so hard. Like when a little kid says “hostible” and “pasgetti”

Now it might sound like I am mocking you and being dismissive of your opinion and patting you on your head. That’s because I am since I hold no regard for it. (aside from the entertainment value I find in it)

I will continue to allow you to entertain me. Dont disappoint me.

No need to apologize geno. You’re one of the good guys.

Any of you fellas ever smoke clams?

No but Id like to smoke some razors. You ever smoke any?

Damn! That's funny!

And spot on!

For josh and Ronald??? Grin

Nope. Got a mess of geoduck that I want to smoke though. Thinking a brine like listed above, cool smoke for a couple hours, then can with just a bit of oil, garlic and pepper?

Doubt it’d come out bad, just lookin for proven recipes. I’d hate to fugg up a few pounds of geoduck!

Give er a whirl!! Make Sure to bring some down to the dollar when done!!! Grin

Haha ol hank usually stays perty quiet. That's funny right there!!

thanks,


I think.

Geno

PS, Hank's meme was pretty funny. I'll have to remember that one!