Homemade Lox and Cold-Smoked Salmon!

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of from what I gather where today we're making this gorgeous cold smoked salmon if you catch a lot of salmon it's a great recipe to have in your arsenal it's classic it's delicious and everyone is gonna love it so let's get started now the first thing I did was to freeze this for two days to kill any parasites that might be in there now as a young kid I never really worried about it and I escaped unscathed but as I get older I think about it more and more and it doesn't affect the quality of this at all to freeze for just a couple of days now that the salmon is thawed I'm gonna begin with the dry cure the dry here I'm gonna be using is a 50/50 mixture of any non-iodized salt I'm using kosher today and sugar and you could use white sugar brown sugar or a combination of the two which is what I'm gonna do today so I've got a cup of kosher salt and I've got a half cup of brown sugar and I'm gonna add just enough 1/2 a cup of white sugar you know I'm gonna mix this all together thoroughly and then coat the salmon with it Oh start with some plastic wrap and put down a nice solid layer of that cure uh-huh toss that on their skin side down and proceeded to coat the top side with cure as well don't worry about using too much you can't use too much you can use too little though it's not fair they've cure I don't want to kind of work that up these edges make sure the sides get nice and salted then I'm gonna wrap this up nice and tight I'm on these edges here and kind of push the push that cure up the side as I go and pull the plastic wrap over it trap it in place there I want to get this nice and tightly wrapped tighter the better excellent now you want to put your salmon packets onto some sort of a tray or a dish that has a nice lip around it because that salts gonna work a lot of liquid out of here overnight in addition to that I'm gonna work out more liquid and compress this a little with another dish on top to which I'm gonna add some kind of weight like a squash and a potato or a couple cans of albacore now this goes out in the refrigerator for 24 hours the next stage of the recipe is the wet brine and the purpose of the wet brine is to kind of rehydrate and puff the fish back up that dry curing is meant to kill any bacteria in there but it dehydrates the fish it makes it very firm so we're gonna put it in a wet brine to rehydrate it and return it to a raw fish texture which is what we're looking for so to begin the wet brine I'll start with one quart of ice cold water so that I've got 1/4 cup or two and a half ounces of kosher salt a plain salt and 1/8 cup of white sugar and I'll just stir that and so everything is completely dissolved and I'll go get my pure fish out of the refrigerator put the two together let's take a look at our dry cured fish oh you can immediately see all of that liquid that came out of there that's why we use this plate with a lip on it to catch that stuff I'll go ahead and unwrap the piece and take a look I can already feel it's very firm the color is darkened up a little bit and it's definitely dehydrated and thinner so I'm going to take this to the sink and thoroughly rinse off all of the dry here before putting it into the wet brine well there's my nice rinse to the churun Salmons really pretty now I'll simply pour the brine into there and this goes back out in the refrigerator for another day day 3 and we're ready for the next step which is a nice soak in cold fresh water to kind of back the salinity down a little I'm going to pour out the brine and then I'm just gonna let a stream of cold tap water run into this and let it overflow for about 5 minutes then I'm gonna turn off that water and just let it soak for about another 5 minutes so after that 10 minute rinse and soak but I have his locks and this is ready I can slice it thin get a bagel some capers and I ins have a party but I'm making cold smoked salmon so that means I got a couple of more steps to go the first of those steps is that I will place these on a wire rack so the air can get around on all sides of it and I'll put this out of the refrigerator for another day or two until I get a nice tacky surface on here that the smoke can stick to well I'm nearly lost track of the days since I started this project but this has been in the refrigerator for a day and a half and the surface is now nice and dry and ready to take on the smoke and since I'm cold smoking and I've got a lot of extra space in the smoker I'm gonna throw in a few blocks of cheese at the same time and have a nice snack plate when I'm done when you're cold smoking this salmon you can't allow the temperatures to get above 80 degrees Fahrenheit so the old way I used to do it would to be either put the racks up here on top of the smoker and I put a cardboard box over that and the smoke would come through the vents on the top and fill that box with smoke and get the job done but it did tend to get a little warm in there during the warmer months so I was pretty limited on a win I could do it well a while back my wonderful wife got me this little smoke generator and I can set off to the side of the smoker then run this silicone tubing into the housing and the smoker fill it with smoke without heating it at all and it's the first time I'm getting to use this guy so I'm pretty excited to see how it comes out so I just need to take the top off I understand fill this chamber with wood pellets I'm using some alder pellets yeah put this back on lock it in and turn that on we'll see how that works here in a bit wow that only took a few minutes and that's really kicking out the smoke I could see some little delinquents getting up to some shenanigans with a machine like this but I'm just gonna pop that into the door of my smoker now right there cover that up and now it's really up to you how smokey you want your cheese and fish I like about four hours of smoke but play around with it and find your sweet spot so the silicone hose that I had on there was causing the unit to overheat and the element was shutting off so I wasn't getting constant smoke so I just popped that off of there and sticking this straight in the door my smoker and now it is really kicking but now we've been going a couple hours check our tips doing perfect all right I think we're done here yeah looks pretty good and now I'm gonna take this and put it in the refrigerator until it's completely chilled off then give it a try and for all of our effort here is the finished product it looks beautiful and it smells great too a nice light smokiness to it very firm in texture so let's slice into this thing and see how we did we're just gonna do very thin slices leave the skin behind oh boy that looks great [Music] turn off the skin beautiful take a look at that man oh it is just velvety the saltiness is just right and that's smoke oh man that is delicious let's putting something together with this [Music] [Music] [Applause] now let's see how we did [Music] let me tell you even through all of those steps and all that time the freshness of the fish carries through it's preserved perfectly that mild cold smoke is absolutely phenomenal and truly a classic and delicious dish and that's as good as you're gonna find anywhere hopefully you can get out a better and get yourself a beautiful salmon like this too but even if you can't I hope you try this and I hope you'll love it and if you do please like and subscribe for more thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Age of Anderson

Views: 3,496

Rating: 4.8961039 out of 5

Keywords: Lox recipe, cold smoked salmon recipe, cold smoked salmon, cold, smoked, salmon, lox, age of anderson, Homemade lox and cold smoked salmon, DIY lox, nova recipe, gravlax, nova lok, gravlox, bagels and smoked salmon, salmon recipes, smoker recipes, oregon, catch and cook, diy smoked salmon, smoked salmon recipe, cold smoking, smoked cheese

Id: NqKmnzAt70w

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019