Cold smoked salmon is the most delicious if you can smoke it yourself. Choose the salmon type, brine composition, time and the smoking conditions yourself, and enjoy a wonderful product. Cold smoked salmon is a delicacy on bagels, on toast and on many vegetables such as asparagus. This product is excellently stored without loss in quality by vacuum sealing it and then storing it in the freezer.
The art of making cold smoked salmon
Making cold smoked salmon requires time, yet not much effort. Take 3 days, the last day is the smoking day.
You require fresh and preferably fatty salmon filet, preferably a half salmon of 1.2 – 3 lbs. King salmon -if you can get it- is the best for taste and fat content. Normally you best choose Atlantic -wild or farmed- salmon as the best compromise between taste, fattiness and cost. Sockeye is excellent for taste, but fat content may be on the low side.
First you need to brine it, i.e. expose it to a mixture of herbs, salt and sugar in the fridge. This is then followed by a drying step in the refrigerator, before the actual smoking can take place. The brining step is done to extract water from the fish and to kill bacteria, which prolongs the storage time. At the same time it impairs taste to the end product. The brine composition and brining time depend mostly on the weight and the filet thickness, respectively.
The drying step is to further lose water at the surface. This helps to form a pellicle, a harder protein layer, on the surface of the fish. Enabling smoke particles to better adhere to the fish.
Then for the smoking you can select your favorite wood. The internal fish temperature should not exceed 25C. Cold smoking requires longer smoking times, the exact timing depending on your smoke concentration and your taste. I target 7 hours of cold smoking, but thicker filets require longer.
Special equipment
A smoker;
a smoker with sufficient airflow and distance between the smoke source and the fish is preferred to reduce adverse effects from the smoking process. The smoker used here is about 6 ft high and 2 ft wide and 2 ft deep, with an regulated air inlet on the side below and a damper regulated exhaust on top. You can also source professional smokers, that follow the same principle.
A smoking tube;
This can be ordered online. Here we use 2 inch by 12 inch cylindrical perforated, stainless steel tubes. Fill them with for example hickory pellets and some small chunks of dried apple wood. One tube lasts for about 4-5 h.
coated steel grids;
For the drying in the fridge and smoking, we use coated steel grids, that can be hand cleaned with soap afterwards.
2 digital thermometers;
One is used to measure the temperature within the thickest filet you smoke. The other is to measure the temperature within the smoker.
plastic vacuum seal able bags;
For the brining we use plastic vacuum sealed bags, but you could do with Zip log bags that are tightly sealed around the fish.
Cold smoked salmon
Ingredients
Brine mixture and fish
- 6.4 oz (180 g) sea salt no added iodine; use 200 g / kg filet
- 2.9 oz (80 g) brown sugar use 88 g / kg filet
- 20 juniper berries use 22 berries / kg filet
- 1/2 bunch of fresh dill use a half bunch / kg filet
- 1 half filet of salmon, here it weighed 32.4 oz (906 g) with skin on!
Smoking
- 2 smoking tubes hickory pellets mixed with some small apple wood chunks
- 2 digital thermometer probes to measure fish internal temperature and the temperature inside the smoking chamber
Instructions
Brining
- Sprinkle two thirds of the brining mixture on the flesh side of the filet and one third on the skin side.
- Place the filet plus ALL the brining mixture (also some that has fallen off) into a plastic bag and vacuum seal (or remove air from bag by immersing the bag in a bucket of water)
- For a filet of 2.3 inch thickness, keep the sealed bag in the fridge for 16 h (for thicker filets, keep the bag longer in the fridge, time is proportional to thickness)
Drying
- Following the brining step, remove the filet from the bag and rinse all brining mixture as much as possible from the filets. Dry with kitchen towel. I weighed the filet to have lost 126 g or 14% of its weight since we started the brining.
- Place the filet skin down on a grid on the refrigerator for a day to further reduce moist
Smoking
- After a day (or at the least a night) of drying in the fridge, start the smoking process for 6-7 hours. We used a crisp summer early morning at 14 C to ensure the fish internal temperature remained below 25C . As temperatures during the day increased, we interrupted the smoking end morning, placed the rack and half smoked fish in the fridge and finished the smoking late in the evening. We also smoke in the winter and that is more efficient.
Resting
- When the smoking is done, place the racks with fish in the refrigerator to mellow and blend the flavors. Do this at the least for 4 h or overnight. I do not wrap the smoked salmon during this time. Your fridge will smell smoky!
Slicing and storage
- First, using a sharp knife, remove the pellicle on the surface and sides of the filet. In our case, the removed weight was 80 g
- Then slice thin slices of smoked salmon from the filet. I package 200 g at a time and vacuum seal followed by freezing
- Closer to the skin, you may find a darker seam in the flesh. that is tasting fine, but is visibly a bit less appealing. I use this mostly for dishes where the cold salmon gets sliced or trimmed in very small pieces.
- The skin weighed also 80 g and was discarded. It means that the drying step in the fridge after brining released 70 g of moist. This means the filet lost 22% of moist due to brining and drying based on the whole filet and this is 24% of moist, if we would assume the skin is not losing moist. It means cold smoked salmon has a more concentrated taste, due to the reduced water content. This also aids the preservation.
Notes
Food allergy & intolerance information: none
Remarks
Smoking in the way described here, requires a smoker that generates enough smoke to process 5 kg of fish or other meat at a time. If you have a small garden or balcony, please consider the neighbors as the smoke may not be appreciated by everyone.
In our test kitchen in Canada, this is fortunately never a problem.
Light the smoking tube with a gas or kerosene flame for about a minute, until the pellets in the smoking tube can sustain a flame for at least a minute without the ignition source. Then blow it out and place the smoking tube on a metal pan or aluminum foil on a almost horizontal plane. Regulate air in flow and exhaust.
