Deliciously Sticky Smoked & Candied Alaskan Salmon

well we had so much fun on our last salmon fishing trip about three days later we were crazy enough to go do it again we caught our limit again we got 12 beautiful sockeye salmon some of them were big this time some of them were a little bit smaller we still got a ton of meat we're gonna do something a little bit different with this batch some of it we've already frozen and got in the freezer for us the rest of it about seven fish we're gonna be making candied salmon this is a process that involves a few different things first we're gonna be slicing this salmon up we're gonna be doing a dry brine on it then it's gonna actually turn wet it's going to pull moisture out of the fish we're going to mix it up let it sit for another day and we're going to take it out of that we're going to air dry it and then finally we're going to smoke it for our finished product which is going to be some delicious candied salmon you can tell we've already have our salmon cleaned we went through and picked out the pin bones which is a very tedious process so these are all bone free ready to go it's getting warm out here it's about 70 degrees today the flies are starting to show up so we're gonna get the salmon sliced up we're probably gonna do about two or three inch sections we're gonna get in our bucket we're going to get the brine on it and we're going to get this all on ice usually we just can our salmon and freeze it but since we are so early in the season we're already catching fish and we're predicting we're going to catch more that we can can later on we thought it'd be cool to try this candied salmon we're going to be leaving the skin on all these fillets and we did candy salmon last year we candied pink salmon and chum salmon this is red salmon so this is a little better tasting of a salmon in our opinion so i have a feeling this is going to turn out extremely good slippery no bones huh nope somebody delicious look at that one alrighty got these all sliced up i'm gonna run inside and grab all the ingredients that we're gonna need for our dry brine we have never done a dry brine before previously we've just done a wet brine where it's basically you got sugar and salt and you add some water to it we're gonna do it dry this time we're gonna see how it turns out i have four cups almost five cups of brown sugar and about four to five cups of white sugar two cups of salt i'm gonna get them all mixed up in here and then we're gonna add them to our fish and put half of that one half of that one and we're gonna make sure the fish is very evenly coated get out of here flies and at that point we'll be ready to put these in our ice chest because we need to keep them very cool and they'll go nice just for 24 hours okay that's what we're kind of looking for the heavy coating both sides and from what i'm red is this is going to pull a lot of moisture out of the fish so in 24 hours there should be a lot of liquid in here and at that point we're going to let it sit for another 24 hours after that we're going to have to kind of drip dry it off and it's going to air dry for a whole another day [Applause] it's been 24 hours since our fish have been an ice chest in their dry brine let's pop it open and see what it looks like in there oh yeah tons of liquid [Applause] wow that's it's actually pretty crazy uh there was no liquid in there we just added the salt and the sugar and we're gonna give this a mix mix it up really nice make sure it's evenly coated and put a little bit more ice in here and they're gonna stay out here for another 24 hours oh it smells sweet oh it shrunk down a lot [Applause] so it's been another 24 hours and our salmon fillets are now ready to move on to the next step of our candied salmon process we're going to bring them inside okay the next part of this process is gonna be really simple we're gonna be air drying the salmon this is my little rack that we built a while ago for just air drying herbs and things like that it's just half inch hardware cloth i got a rag underneath there because the salmon is gonna be dripping and it's really sticky all we're gonna be doing is taking the pieces of salmon out like this letting them drip for a second and place them on the rack and we're gonna put our little fan on them we're gonna let them air dry for another 24 hours before we start smoking them another thing i want to mention is the salmon has definitely changed it's still got the dice color it's darkened up a little bit the fillets have shrunken down and they've firmed up quite a bit all right that's the last one we completely filled up our little drying rack okay got our little fan hooked up and this is gonna go for 24 hours we've actually never air dried salmon when we're smoking we smoked a lot of salmon but we've never air dried it we're going to see how this works out and tomorrow we'll be able to throw this on the smoker but for now ariel's going to jump in here and she's also going to be making some caviar for us for our caviar we're going to be using some sock eye ro and these eggs came from the reds that are processed for our candied salmon and you can also use other types of salmon we've used chum and pink salmon they have much bigger eggs compared to the sock right but i really like the way the soft guys taste we've only done this a few times and i think i was kind of making it harder than it needed to be because i figured out a really good solution last time i'm just going to show you it was fairly quick it doesn't even take that long so the eggs have this membrane on the outside and what i just try to do is just try to get as many eggs as i can off of that membrane just kind of kind of delicately but if i get some of the membrane in the bowl i'm not worried about that either i've read lots of different ways to do this you can use like a little knife you can even use like a little bit of mesh and kind of rub the eggs through that well i've tried that and for me that just didn't work i was just like i said making it too hard this has been way easier to do it this way this next part is going to be the part that takes the longest but i've got it down pretty quickly so the trick is to use very very very hot water really really hot scalding hot and that is going to be how we're going to rinse these so i'm going to head over to the sink i'm just kind of using my fingers and just breaking up the the membrane and the sacs i'm just kind of just swishing everything around our water's getting really hot and then what i do is i pour the water out trying not to get too many of the eggs out i'm basically just going to repeat this process did that about 10 times and i'm just gonna do it one more time drain it out then i'm going to transferring it to our strainer basically going to be rinsing these and getting these ready for our salt brine eric dissolved half a cup of kosher salt in three cups of water that's what we're gonna be using for a brine and you can brine it for a really long time i think caviar is usually done for 10 to 15 minutes i've seen some recipes that call for longer we do not like ours that salty at all so we usually do just a few minutes and you probably could tell when we were using the hot water on the row the eggs went cloudy they're going to get back to that really beautiful color in just a moment when i get them in here and don't worry if you have some of the membrane left because it's not really a big deal i usually strain it once more and we get some of that out we're gonna give this a stir and i think our golden number was four minutes this is sat for four minutes we're gonna give it one final rinse and then we'll be ready to put in some jars well we ended up with just a little bit more than one whole half pint so we're actually putting this one in the freezer that's how we're going to preserve it and we're going to save this for fresh eating and what i read for preserving it is to just add a little bit of olive oil i mean not not much at all really i just give it a light stir with a spoon we add a lid and it's ready to go in the freezer and we're going to pull it out when we run out of our fresh caviar and eat this so there you go it's really really simple you can get your hands on fresh eggs salmon roe they are awesome to try for [Music] this okay good morning it's been another 24 hours and i'm not gonna lie the salmon is looking beautiful it turned like a candy apple red it's it's not sticky anymore it's not wet it's really firmed up i mean you can touch it your fingers are completely dry we're gonna get the smoker loaded up we're gonna do this in kind of different sections because we have so many pieces that are real small and then you know we've got some that are real big so we're gonna kind of section them off because the small ones are gonna have to come off first then we're gonna start smoking the meat i hadn't touched just now i'll just give them to you by what do you want like it's kind of we're going to meet well this is thick this is yeah medium those are still thick or medium whatever just gurky yeah dust door that one is [Music] all right we're getting the smoker fired up we're just starting with firewood just spruce kindling and then today we're actually smoking this all with some birch but before this gets smoking we get door closed we're going to whip up a little glaze real quick and we're going to candy the salmon even more so i'm thinking this is going to smoke for probably three to four hours and i'm going to glaze it like every half an hour or 45 minutes and to do that we have one jar of spruce tip syrup that ariel made last season and then this is leftover cowboy candy marinade this was actually about three jars of it and it was a little thin so i boiled it down and we have a very thick sticky glaze we're gonna mix these two together and we're gonna be basting it on the salmon yeah look how thick that is oh gosh look at how thick that is it looks like molasses look at that you need it like like candy candy jalapenos how did you even get that on i don't know i might have to heat it up i would eat it you turned it into honey honey please let's see if i can mix it okay this is way too thick i'm gonna go inside and heat this up we're gonna do like a double boiler on it so steam it get this a little hotter and we're almost ready for our birch on there okay there we go oh my gosh that's good oh it's spicy spicy and sweet could you taste the lemon oh did you get here with the fumes the smoke got me can you taste the lemon at all or the spruce yeah it's really good oh it's bad this was that sunglasses tan i know i got it from nebraska oh my gosh i still got something more to do goggles maybe yeah oh that is a that is a horror that is a smoky fire you know what to say about that i still got to do some more maybe i stand down here you know i mean like this no it doesn't really help there's just smoke everywhere in there okay we'll check on these in a half an hour and we'll baste them again i'm probably gonna do it every half an hour really want a real sticky consistency on them when they're done looks good all right we're hour and a half in we've basted them twice this is gonna be the third time let's see what they're looking like in it yeah they're a little bigger good oh they're sticky that's rain it's starting to rain we're trying something a little different this time usually well pretty much every time we smoke salmon we always get some of them that stick to the grill and that's not a problem because we're usually canning it we don't use the skin anyways but these ones are going to keep the skin on them and i want them to look nice i want them to come off the grill so what i did was i took my basting brush before we started smoking them and i took some olive oil and i rubbed down the whole grill so so far they're not sticking so we'll see how it works well our friend the sandhill crane has returned and it looks like he found himself a girlfriend so they were just up here checking out the smoker we came outside now they're in the back of the bog looks like they're going to leave pretty soon the wingspan on these birds is just huge okay i think we got probably about an hour and a half left of smoking i'm gonna do one more really good basting load up the smoker one more time and we're gonna let them go and then let the smoker kind of cool off and we'll be able to taste test these they're looking really good and they smell great oh yeah they're so sticky okay that'll do it this is just perfect timing it is starting to rain and our salmon is officially done how long does it go for about four and a half hours of good smoking with the birch wood we're going to pull the door off and we're going to try it see how it is no peel i want to eat a small one let's eat this one i'll eat this one did they stick no just a tiny bit of stickage but not bad oh we're not sharing a piece no let's try this oh they're definitely done that's really good it's really salty and it's got it's not overly sweet at all first impressions it's it is good we had this last year i think it's great this is like a great snack food you know bring it out on the go have something sweet with some protein this is good it's really good it is not overly salty like you mentioned or sweet surprisingly it's salty and then like an aftertaste of sweet sweetness the texture is really nice it's like a nice really firm firm hard it's sticky i think it's really good it turned out great i'll get a piece right here if i need it i just want to look at one of these big chunks yeah those are beautiful beautiful piece and spreading the olive oil on the grill yes worked great the only thing that's a little bit sticky is just the sugar that's not bad that's kind of on the grill but these are so easy to pull off there oh these are gonna look beautiful and i was really happy with that birch wood it's smoked for a long time i think it burned a little longer than the alder we usually use and i think it gave a pretty good flavor honestly i don't really notice if there was much of a difference in the flavor so i guess that's good i think it's time to head inside yep we got a lot of salmon we got to grab something to bring this all inside the last fight oh it's beautiful look it's like look at the gold almost it's a little bone right there but it's uh do you know anything with that with this sticky i almost want it to be like sugar like more more sugar more brown sugar more like it's like pure sugar we put on there i don't know i like it i really like it i think it turned out very oh it totally did it's not sticking oh my gosh that is freaking beautiful gorgeous gorgeous stuff let me get this one more piece you smell that smells like salmon salty sweetness i think if there's i only saw like one or two bones but um i think if there's any bones it's impossible to take them out at this point unfortunately we had to put our old food saver out of commission we had it for about six years we did many many wild animals domestic ones too that we raised we just did a lot for years we use that we worked that thing on vegetables too and so he finally took a he didn't took it down yeah so we have this new guy with us yeah the old one was a food saver this is a food saver also that we bought and this is like the game saver one but so far it's working really good for us and this this is a finished product right here a lot of hard work a lot of fishing a lot of processing and smoking of the meat that's beautiful what do you think i said very nice and what we're going to be doing with this is we're vacuum sealing it and we are going to be keeping this in the freezer until we're ready to eat it and then at that point when we want a bag we'll take it out of the freezer we'll thaw it out and keep it in a cool place or keep in the fridge until we finish it this can't really be kept on the counter as is right now this just hasn't been dried dried long enough and we're pretty sure if you just kept smoking this maybe double the time it would probably dry out enough where that would kind of preserve it itself and you wouldn't have to freeze it i'm not sure about the whole candy salmon but i know you could you can salt it and for sure air dry it and smoke it yep it'll be stable you ready all right for how you use this thing but we have a lot more to do yep and we're gonna finish these up we're going to put them in the freezer and we look forward to opening these up come summertime and get a great snack we'll catch you guys on the next video okay this one is okay sorry this isn't going to be the good looking one or do you think i should wait till you get down to the thick ones no these are great get them different ones these would be awesome that's what it's all about right there [Applause] beauties [Music] [Applause] really revs up huh powerful motor oh

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 552,888

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, fishing in alaska, cabin living, off grid living alaska, off grid cabin, alaska fishing, homestead alaska, alaska salmon fishing, fishing salmon alaska, smoking salmon, preserving salmon, smoker for fish, red salmon alaska, sockeye salmon alaska, candies salmon, salmon candy, how to smoke salmon, salmon candy recipe, dry brine salmon, salt brine salmon, glazed salmon, make salmon candy, smoked salmon

Id: oszlfq7haJI

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021