Apple wood smoked salmon with apricot glaze

One of my roommates is obsessed with smoked salmon, and he got the rest of us into it. I mean I liked it before, but we’ve taken smoked salmon indulgence to near sinful levels. This was actually my first time trying to do it on my own, but it turned out fantastic and I hope to try many variations in the future. The general process of smoking involves choosing a fish, curing it and then smoking it and there are many potential forks in the road for each of these steps:

Choosing a fish

Really, any char fish works well (char being things like salmon, trout, steelhead). Here, I am smoking an Alaskan king salmon. Try to buy fish that is wild-caught when you can.

Alaskan king salmon

Hot vs. cold smoking

Most smoked salmon that you buy in grocery stores sold in blocks is hot smoked. Cold smoked salmon is what is typical of those pre-sliced lox packages you buy vacuum sealed, and allows for the fish to be super soft. The difference, as the name indicates, is in the temperature at which they’re smoked. Cold smoked fish is cooked at a temperature not exceeding 86 F, meaning colder than the ambient air on a typical summer day in Virginia. To cold-smoke you generally need 2 compartments, one for the fish and one as a smoke box. The smoke is then channeled in pipes to the compartment holding the fish.

With hot smoking the temperature is usually between 150 and 220, but should never exceed that. The hardest part is keeping the temperature low, otherwise you start grilling your fish. If you start seeing that white gooey stuff come out, your temperature is too hot and you’ve already grilled your salmon. That’s albumin (think egg whites) being pushed out by the fish muscle fibers contracting too hard in the heat.

Since I don’t yet have a smoker, I had to devise a way to keep my small grill cool enough to smoke the salmon without overheating it.

Curing

It is necessary to cure the fish before you smoke it. Options here include a wet cure, which is a mix of salt, sugar and water, or a dry cure which has no water. The wet cure makes for a softer fish and the dry cure makes for a harder fish that keeps longer.

Prep time: 12 hr

Cook time: 2-4 hrs, all mostly passive!

Ingredients:

2-3 lbs of char fish of choice

1.5 cups brown sugar

1/4 cup kosher salt (or sea salt–just don’t use iodized salt which will flavor your fish!)

1 tsp of freshly ground black pepper (too much and it overtakes)

1/4 cup dried apricots

1/4 cup white sugar

a squeeze of lime or lemon

Equipment:

A grill or smoker

Apple wood chips

1) Prep your fish: In COLD water wash your fish and pat dry. You can choose to leave the skin on or off. I chose off, which you can accomplish by gently pulling the skin off the back, taking care not to rip out any muscle. Cut into several slices and set aside.

Little helpers can be utilized in the patting-dry of the fish

2) Cure your fish: In a bowl, mix the salt, brown sugar, and pepper. Place your fish in a glass bowl or pan and pack the cure all around it. Wrap and refrigerate for 8 hours, a little longer or less depending on the thickness of the fish.

Pretty soon, you’ll see the salt has sucked out a lot of water.

Wash the fish in cold water to stop the curing process and cut into serving sizes.

This next step is pretty important. Lay the fish out on a cooling rack (I don’t have one at home so I used an oven rack) such that it is well aerated all around and leave it to dry somewhere cool for 3-4 hours. This is important for developing the pellicle, which is the rim of dried skin on the fish that will retain the flavor during smoking. Don’t skip this step!

Here an oven rack is converted into a cooling rack. Turn a fan on and let it dry for a few hours.

3) Smoke your fish. Now comes the fun part! If you have a smoker, set the temp to 170 and slowly work it up to 200 over an hour. You can choose apple, hickory, alder or any hardwood really. Some say mesquite is not a good wood because it overpowers the flavor of the fish. Here I use apple.

The apple wood is soaked for a few minutes before the flames

The apple wood is soaked for a few minutes in preparation for the flames

Now, some people make a huge fuss about getting everything exactly right with the smoker. And one of these days I intend to buy one, but here’s a way to convert a rusty old grill into a poor man’s smoker that will make fish to rival the best ones on the market.

Again the hardest part is not getting it too hot. Here I light just a few bricks (about 10-12) until they’re ashed over and keep on one far side of the grill. I’ve pre-soaked my apple chips in water and transfer them to a piece of foil poked with holes, which then goes on top of the hot coals. Place the fish on the opposite side of the grill. If it’s still too hot, keep removing coals until you’re down to just a few. All you really need is enough heat to start smoking some of the wood. The wood will periodically burn out, don’t be shy about adding a little handful to your foil tray every so often.

Just a few coals are lighted to keep this small little grill from getting too hot

Just a few coals are lighted to keep this little grill from getting too hot

The apple wood is placed in foil over the small pile of brickets. The brickets should burn for a long time, but the wood will periodically smoke out and will need to be replaced.

Smoke the fish for 3-4 hours. The longer you smoke it, the harder it will be and the longer it will keep. I found that 3.5 hours was quite sufficient at a range of 160-200 F. Some smoke it for up to 6 and even 8 hours.

4) Glaze your fish. I meant to go the store to buy some apricot jam to turn into a glaze but kept forgetting. Fortunately, we had some dried apricots at home so I decided I’d experiment. I finely chopped the apricots and placed in 1/3 cup boiling water. I promptly proceeded to screwing up again by adding the sugar too soon before the apricots had gotten soft. But no worries! One must be equally creative with solutions. I pureed the mixture in a magic bullet, added some more water to thin and returned to the stove for about 10 min. I added a pinch of lime right before I took it off to keep the sugar from crystalizing. And voila, apricot glaze. Frankly, it was delicious. Pure apricot flavor with little more than sugar for added sweetness and a hint of lime. Better than store bough jam, I say.

The glaze is ready. Smooth and sweet and apricot

About 1 hr into smoking, I glazed half the salmon with my mixture and kept doing that until about 20 min before I removed it from the smoker. That way the glaze had dried and smoked and integrated with the very being of that Alaskan gem.