TKQ: November 2014

SMOKING RECIPE CLIFF NOTES:

Smoked Salmon:

- Rinse the salmon, put in a cooking dish covered in dark rum, and place in the fridge for 15 minutes

- Make the brine, combining1.5 tbsp black pepper, 3/4 cup coarse sale, and 1.5 cups brown sugar

- Pull salmon, cover in the brine all over, and place back in the fridge for 4 hours

- Rinse of extra brine and put the salmon on the smoker at a temp of 200-225 degrees

- When internal temp of the salmon his 140 degrees (after 1.5-2 hours), pull it off the smoker

- Serve with cracker and cream cheese

Last Sunday, November 2, we didn't have much going on, so I decided it would be another good opportunity to use my smoker. However, having been only two weeks removed from my multi-meat smokefest for the FSU gamemulti-meat smokefest for the ND/FSU game, I wanted to think of something a little "less" meaty. This past summer, while at Kristen's parents house in KC, we had some of her dad's smoked salmon - something I haven't eaten a lot of in my life - and it was outstanding. So, I decided this would be a good opportunity to give it a try myself, and with that came my first go at smoked salmon.

I read a few of my go-to blogs on bbq/smoking for advice (Amazing Ribs and Virtual Weber Bullet - I highly recommend both for all your smoking questions that I haven't covered yet), got some advice from my father-in-law, Rick, and then just did some of my usual googling to see what else the web had to say about the process of smoking salmon. Piecing a few different approaches together, I settled on this approach.

For starters, I had to buy the salmon. You may have been surprised in my last post to find out I get a lot of my meat from Costco. Well, you may be even more surprised to find out I got my salmon from Costco as well.

Pre-packaged salmon filet from Costco

Label close-up - 3.29lbs!

As you can see, the piece of salmon that I settled on was 3.29lbs, which seemed like way too much. But in typical Costco fashion, it was about the smallest that they offered. Plus, my plan for this smoke session was to make plenty of extras to freeze and have at a later date, so I didn't mind using the larger piece of fish.

The next step was to take the salmon out of the wrapper and begin removing the skin and any extra bones that are still in it.

The full 3.29lb salmon filet laid across two cutting boards

Upon removing the salmon from the packaging, I got my first two surprises of the day. Surprise #1 was that this filet was folded over in the packaging, and was even larger than I initially thought it was. I know the picture above doesn't necessarily do it justice, but I had to break out two cutting boards to spread it out in it's entirety. It was huge.

Surprise #2 was a pleasant one - it had already been completely cleaned. The skin and all the bones were already removed. I did have a plan for doing all of that myself. But since I didn't end up having to do it, I'm not going to talk about that here. Maybe next time (though I'm more than happy never having to do it either!).

So with the fish out, I first ran it under some cold water and patted it down with a paper towel. This was just to clean it off a bit, though I have to admit, the salmon came out very clean and smelled very fresh. Costco - quality meat and quality fish!

As mentioned earlier, after getting advice from a few different people and websites, I decided that I was going to give the salmon a rum and brown sugar dry brine prior to smoking it. So at this point, it was time to let it sit in some dark rum for a bit.

Barcardi Gold for my dark rum, for no particular reason

Salmon folded up to fit in a large baking dish

Salmon sitting in the rum

As you can see from the above, I put the salmon in a large baking dish. Because of it's size, I had to fold it over a bit. I then poured the entire bottle of dark rum on top of it. If I had planned a little better for the size of the salmon, I would have either a) found a large dish to use so it could all stretch out flat or b) bot more rum to pour in the dish so it was all covered. But this worked fine anyway. From there, I covered it with cellophane, and then put it in the fridge for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, I pulled the salmon from the fridge. I removed it from the pan and rinsed it off in cold water, and patted it down with paper towels. I cleaned out the pan, put the salmon back in it, covered it back up with cellophane, and put it back in the fridge. This entire step wouldn't have happened if I didn't have to go the grocery store to get a few ingredients that I realized I mistakenly didn't have on hand. If I had everything I needed, I would have made the brown sugar dry brine while the salmon was sitting in rum in the fridge, and then gone straight into putting the brine on the salmon, and then putting it back in the fridge. Just fyi. I also didn't want to keep the salmon sitting in rum for an extended time, so that's why I removed it and rinsed it off.

So moving on, after getting all the ingredients, I made the brine. It was a very simple mixture of 1.5 tbsp of black pepper, 3/4 cup of course salt, and 1.5 cups of brown sugar. I mixed it all together in a big bowl and set it aside to put on the salmon.

I then took the salmon out of the fridge, and started cutting it up. Because I wanted to make this for a future date, and planned to freeze it, I decided it would be best to have it in separate pieces. So I cut the entire thing into 5 roughly similarly sized pieces. Then it was time to put the brine on the salmon.

Salmon cut up into 5 pieces

Putting the salmon pieces in the pan and covering with brown sugar dry brine

Covering every inch of the salmon that I can

Final look at the salmon in the brine before putting in the fridge

The pictures above show the process of covering the salmon in the brine. First, I put sprinkled some of it on the bottom of the cooking dish. I then was able to lay out 3 of the 5 salmon pieces, and covered them all over with the brine. Lastly, I put the remaining two salmon pieces on top (just because of a lack of room in the cooking dish otherwise), and continued to cover the salmon in the brine. When I had used it all up, I covered the dish in cellophane and once again, put it in the fridge for the next four hours.

With about 30 minutes to go until I pull the salmon from the fridge, I fired up my Weber Smokey Mountain. As with any other time I'm getting it started, I got a full chimney of charcoals lit in a fire starter. I didn't bother adding unlit charcoal into the base of the smoker to use the "minion method" (previously mentioned method of helping a fire burn longer) since I wasn't going to need that much heat for that long. The plan is only to cook the salmon for 1.5-2 hours ultimately. I kept most of the lower three vents completely closed because I wanted to get a consistent temperature of the smoker between 200-225 degrees F.

After having been sitting in the brine for four hours, it was time to pull the salmon out of the fridge.

Last 2 remaining pieces of salmon in the brine

All 5 salmon pieces rinsed and ready to go on the smoker

Close-up look at the darker and firmer salmon after 4 hours in the brine

I pulled the cooking dish out of the fridge and removed the cellophane wrap. I then took each piece of salmon and once again ran it under some cold water to rinse off all the leftover brown sugar brine. You can see from the second and third pictures how the salmon pieces hold a slightly darker color. What you can't see is how they feel, which is a bit firmer. This is because of the brine, which is often thought to give meat or fish a spongy kind of feel.

I then moved the salmon outside and put them on the smoker, which had been running consistently in the 200-225 degree temperature range.

All five pieces on the top rack

Fully fired up smoker with salmon!

You can see all five pieces of salmon laid out on the top rack of my smoker, in no particular order. I also have the internal smoker temperature gauge on the rack, as well as a "meat" thermometer inserted in one of the pieces. The temperature of the smoker when I put the salmon on was specifically 215 degrees.

Once I had the salmon on the smoker, I added 3-4 pieces of cherry wood through the smoke door. This got the process of actual smoking going, and was plenty to cover the salmon throughout the smoke.

My plan was to have the salmon on the smoker for 1.5-2 hours. However, I also didn't want to let the fish internal temperature to raise much above 140 degrees. After one hour on the smoker, the fish temperature was hitting 140 degrees on the thermometer. But I was worried that it hadn't been sitting on the smoker long enough. So I went out and checked with an instant read thermometer, and found that most pieces were coming up closer to 120 degrees. So I decided to keep the fish on longer.

After another 35 minutes, having been on smoker for a total of an hour and thirty-five minutes, I found most of the salmon pieces to have a temperature of around 140-150 degrees. There was also a piece that was closer to 155 degrees. So ultimately, I may have over-cooked them all a bit, as ideally they all would have been right at 140 degrees when I pulled them. Either way, they were done, and I pulled them off the smoker.

Final look before pulling the salmon off the smoker

Smoked salmon!

Smoked salmon close-up!

After pulling the salmon off the smoker, I let them sit out on the counter for a bit as I wanted them to cool down. You can see how much darker they are now, as they have been taking on a lot of smoke the entire time.

Given my plan to freeze these for later, I put them all individually in the freezer uncovered, to let them get hard. This way, when I freeze-wrapped them, they wouldn't get smushed (from being too soft). So I freeze-wrapped each one, and they are sitting in my freezer as we speak, just waiting for the right occasions to break them out to eat.

I did keep one of the pieces out for us to try. It had a great smokey taste, with just a hint of sweetness coming from the rum and brown sugar brine. While it wasn't too bad, it definitely was a bit over-cooked. The best way to tell was when I would run a fork across it, it wasn't flaking up as easily as I would have liked. It was moist, but once again, I'd prefer it to be a little moreso. But I had intentionally chosen the thinnest piece as our test run, so presumably, it was the most over-cooked of the bunch. We'll see! I'll be serving the others some day soon with some crackers and cream cheese. Can't wait to see how it goes.