An Experiment in Salmon Smoking

I have smoked a lot of salmon over the years. I use a tried and true salt and sugar dry brine, usually on fillets that have been portioned into 6-8 ounce pieces and occasionally on full fillets. I have long thought that it would be fun to experiment with smoking a whole, intact salmon. Minus the head and guts, of course. I decided to finally to give it a go this week.

The fish i chose was a 4.3lb Coho Salmon harvested in Southeast Alaska by the fishing vessel Shinaku. The fish was flash frozen in Pelican and shipped to us in the usual way…in the cargo hold of an Alaska Airlines passenger jet. It took a couple days to fully thaw under refrigeration. Finally, yesterday afternoon it was fully thawed and ready for me to work with.

Before I continue discussing the smoking process, let me just draw your attention to the belly cavity in the photo below. Notice how clean it is. It is totally pristine! This is because the fishermen we buy from are top notch fish handlers. They practice several techniques which preserve the quality of the fish after harvest and ensure that our customers get the highest quality salmon available anywhere in the world. I’ll highlight a couple of those techniques here.

The first key to quality fish handling is to quickly and humanely kill the fish as soon as it comes out of the water. This prevents the fish from flapping around on deck while it slowly suffocates, causing damage to the meat and loss of scales. The second and equally important thing is to immediately clean the fish using a technique called pressure bleeding wherein the fish cleaner connects a hose to an artery in the fish’s neck to flush seawater through the veins, pushing out all the blood. This helps to preserve the flavor and texture of the fish. Next time you think about buying grocery store salmon, ask the folks behind the counter if their fish are handled like this. I suspect you’ll get a blank stare followed by a sheepish “I don’t know.”

Ok, on with the fish smoking story…

The main reason not to smoke intact fish is that the skin serves as a barrier preventing the smoke from fully penetrating the meat. Me being me, I had to push the boundaries a little and test the conventional wisdom. I came up with a compromise that seemed to hold some promise. In order to allow smoke to penetrate the flesh, I would use the Deba knife I bought in Japan last fall to make a series of incisions along both sides of the fish to expose the flesh to the smoke. The incisions having been made, I packed them with my salt and sugar dry brine to extract moisture from the fish prior to smoking.

After being worked over by the brine for about three hours, the fish looked like this:

Notice the water around the fish in the picture above. Had I filleted the fish prior to brining, there would have been significantly more water drawn out of it. After carefully rinsing the brine off of the salmon and patting it dry, it was time to put it in the smoker.

For this smoke I used my Pit Boss vertical smoker which I splurged on earlier this spring. I went back and forth between this and a Kamado style smoker like a Big Green Egg, Kamado Joe, or similar. In the end I decided to go with the Pitt Boss electric pellet smoker as a matter of time and convenience. As busy as life is with three littles and a growing fish business, I thought I’d get more use out of the pellet smoker. In any case, it’s been a great smoker for the couple months that I’ve had it. So far we have done pork ribs, brisket, whole chickens, and salmon. We have yet to be disappointed with the results of any of our smoking endeavors.

After about five and a half hours on the smoker, here were the results:

Going into this experiment, I figured the conventional wisdom would hold and that I’d find out it’s better to fillet a salmon before smoking it than to attempt to smoke it whole. But I had to satisfy my curiosity and, let’s be honest, I knew it would yield some awesome pictures to post online.

So how was it? Not bad if I do say so myself. The smoke did not fully penetrate the meat so even after five and a half hours in the smoker it has a fairly light smoke flavor. It turned out fall-off-the-bone tender and is delicious by itself and makes an excellent spread when mixed with cream cheese. Actually, Sarah likes it more than I do! I generally prefer a heavier smoke that simply can’t be achieved on an intact salmon.

I’ve smoked a whole salmon and my curiosity has been satisfied. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’ll go back to the tried and true method of smoking smaller fillet portions to get that deep and even smoke flavor I love.

If you’ve ever bucked the conventional wisdom and experimented with fish in unconventional ways just to satisfy your curiosity, we’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line at fish@savoryalaska.com!