Cold (Indian) Smoked Salmon

Before my Cookshack days I used to attempt to make dried cold smoked salmon in a converted refrigerator. I had rigged up an internal fan, but when I fired up the little smoking pot I couldn't keep the temperatures less than about 115 degrees. Cold smoking should be done in the range of 80-90 degrees, always less than 100.

When I bought my Smokette, I ordered it with a cold smoking baffle. Much to my amazement it worked. I did a couple of small batches of salmon and cheese.

Earlier this spring a local market had pink salmon on sale for $1.49 a pound so I bought several, and hot smoked (kippered) them. I was so pleased with the quality of the frozen salmon, I went back and bought 4 more. I also enjoyed the salmon more than I remembered, but my favorite salmon is not hot smoked salmon, but what is called Indian Smoked, which is really cold smoked salmon that is very dry, so that the Indians could keep it without refrigeration over the winter.

There is really not enough room in a Smokette to do more than a couple of salmon at a time, so I ordered a cold smoking baffle, for my CS 105 (CS 150 circa 1992).

These are the results of that first attempt at making Indian Smoked Salmon in a CS. For those unfamiliar with cold smoking, it does not dry or cook the fish. One of the posts in the archives talks about it being rubbery. If you are not going to make Indian Salmon, I suggest you get large filets of fresh salmon and plan on using it as sliced lox, or scotched smoked which is another subject.

I started with 17 pounds of head off frozen pink salmon, after filleting I had about 3 1/2 pounds of bones trimmings, and 13 1/2 pounds of filets. I made about 2 quarts of fish stock out of the bones.

I decided that I wanted a little preservative power in the brine so I decided to use straight Morton's Sugar Cure, one cup/per quart of water. One and a half quarts total. I brined all parts for 90 minutes. (This seems a little salty for my taste, an hour probably would have been sufficient.)

From there I moved the fish to french fry racks for hotel pans. I lucked out and have 4 that fit the rack slots in my 105. I also have some that don't. Take a tape and measure them before you buy to see if they will fit. I put them in front of a box fan for 2 hours for a good pellicle to develop.

In the picture you will also see three pieces of beef I was curing to make "beef bacon" or something. It has about 2 weeks in the dry curing process, but I thought I would cold smoke it anyway, the rest I will hot smoke when the cure is complete.

I put 4 pieces of Kingsford charcoal in the smoker box and lit it on my gas backpacking stove. The directions say 2, next time I will follow the directions. I added 2 small handfuls of apple and cherry chucks, which are really chips and closed the door with the cold smoking baffle in place. The temperature in the CS didn't get above about 87 during the time I figured that there was active smoke, after the black box of the CS received direct sun it moved up to 95 and remained there until evening.

I took everything out at about 8 hours. The fish was still very moist has you would expect from a CS, so I put it back in front of the fan where it remained over night.

This morning I remembered my thrift store hippie era dehydrator, checking it out on the lowest temperature setting it was in the low 80's. I moved the fish to there and will probably take them out probably at about 30 hours total from out of the brine, but that will vary with the pieces.

Stopped the drying process at 5PM local time, total time from out of the cure 30 hours. It is not at dry as real Indian smoked, it would probably take another 10 hrs or so by backing into it like I did. At about noon I removed the skin from the filets, the main reason is that it smelled so good I wanted to create some samples. I removed about a pound of skin, so that means I started with about 12 1/2 skinless filets and ended up with 6 lb. 10 oz of smoked fish. Yield about 54 percent from the skinless filets, about 40 percent from the store weight.

Next time I will skin the filets right out of the smoker before they go into the dehydrator. The finish salt level is just about perfect for a cold beer. A tad bit too salty for real eating. The smoke level is just right for me. Man do I like the taste, sure better than store bought.

I stopped by the store to see if they had anymore salmon. I ended up with a 10 pound bag of pollock filets. I've never smoked any pollock, but if it turns out half as good as the salmon it will be just fine.