Smoking salmon

There was definitely a miracle on 34th Street or whatever street the Claycomb house is on the night before Christmas Eve. While digging through the freezer to find something or the other, I found one last package of salmon fillets. It was a fillet of silvers from two years ago while fishing with Alaska Expedition. The Claycomb girls were rejoicing — which brings up the topic of this week’s article: How to smoke salmon.

There are a lot of good ways to cook salmon but the two favorite methods in my house are blackened and smoked.

Blackening is not hard. Skin the salmon. I like to use a pair of needle-nose pliers and pull out all of the bones. Next, melt a little butter in a Lodge cast iron skillet. Drop the fillet in the butter and then flip. Pull it out and sprinkle on heavily some Paul Prudhomme’s Blackened Redfish spices. The butter will cause the spices to stick to the fillet.

Add a little butter to the skillet and turn up the heat. The Cajuns say to do this outside because you want the skillet smoking. I don’t cook it quite that hot, but you do want it to semi-burn a crust on the outside pretty fast. If the heat is too low, it will cook the fish throughout and be dry. You want to get a blackened crust on the outside, but the inside of the fillet should be almost rare or at least moist. Salmon is great blackened.

But the way that my girls like it best is smoked. So that’s what we’re going to focus on today. Here’s how I do it. Leave the skin on (I’ll explain why later). Pull the bones with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

Mix 3 to 4 cups of warm water with ¾ cup brown sugar, ¼ cup white sugar, salt, little pepper, ginger and stir. You can marinate your fillet in a cake pan or it works nice to put it in a plastic bag. Squeeze the air out of the bag so the marinade and bag are semi-tight against the fillet.

Marinating fish or jerky in a bag is nice because every hour you can massage it and not even get your hands dirty. On fish, I just flip it, which will help ensure that all surface areas are being marinated.

I like to let my salmon marinate at least four hours. In the old days, I’d smoke it on my smoker or grill on a piece of foil, skin side down. But that holds in the moisture so it tastes broiled instead of smoked. Here’s the best way. Smoke your salmon on a board, skin side down. The skin will stick to the board but no big deal because you aren’t going to eat the skin anyway.

The Native Americans will tell you to use a cedar plank but an oak cutting board or whatever will work fine. I soak my board in water before smoking to prevent it from burning, but most of my smoking boards are all charred on bottom.

For ease and consistency, I use a Camp Chef wood pellet grill. That way I can regulate the heat to a T, and it still has a good smoke flavor. I suppose any flavor of wood is good, but on fish I prefer apple.

Smoking on a wood plank lets the moisture run off so you get a dried fillet instead of a water-logged, broiled-tasting piece of fish.

Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.

Post Author: By Tom Claycomb

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