Our friend has been visiting us this week and he is a new Bradley owner. Thinking that I know what I'm doing ( yeah, right! ), he wanted to learn to smoke salmon. I have never smoked salmon before but what a great opportunity to try it out with a fellow Bradley Buddy!We basically followed Kummock's method but we modified the brine a little.
For our 5 pounds of salmon we used this:
Brine
1 quart water
1 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup pickling salt
1/2 pound of brown sugar
2 TBS pickling spice
We used 3 pounds of Coho (silver) salmon and 2 pounds of Sockeye (red) salmon. The skin-on fillets were 1" thick. We made sure that they were free of bones.
We marinaded this in the fridge for 8 hours turning about every two hours. It looks nice sitting there in the Pyrex pan but I ending up putting it in a 2 gallon ziploc bag when I saw how full the pan got.
After marinading, we reaching the glazing stage. The salmon pieces were placed on smoking racks and placed in the fridge for 15 hours. I didn't know what exactly they should look like when the pellicle was formed but now I understand. They came out very glossy but not wet just sticky to the touch.We smoked them using 2 1/2 hours of alder.
2 hours at 100F
3 hours at 140F
1 hour at 175F
They came out fantastic! The sockeye's were richer because of their higher oil content but they were both delicious. My Bradley Smoker never ceases to amaze me. I could not have imagined making a smoked salmon on my own of such high quality.