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cold smoked salmon ©️ Nel Brouwer-van den Bergh

Cold smoked salmon

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Prep Time 2 days
Cook Time 7 hours
4 hours
Total Time 2 days 11 hours
Course Appetizer
Cuisine North American, Scandinavian
Servings 16

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.
    digital thermometers during smoking ©️ Nel Brouwer-van den Bergh

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!
    cold smoked salmon fillet©️ Nel Brouwer-van den Bergh

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

Method: raw
Food allergy & intolerance information: none
Keyword brine, cold, salmon, smoked salmon, smoking