How to Brine and Smoke Salmon for Canning

welcome to alaskan man adventures this episode's on how to smoke salmon for canning this episode's sponsored by sitka wildlife tours now if you enjoy this video make sure you hit the subscribe button don't forget to check out my other videos and i hope to see you sometime soon in alaska remember it's very important to descale and de-slime your salmon before you start your processing if you don't know that technique check out my de-sliming and descaling video and that'll teach you all the tricks on how to do that right and very easily okay i'm gonna start by adding fish to my brine this is a very simple brine of basically a half gallon of water and one cup of sea salt i use sea salt because that's what these fish came from the ocean and it's just that perfect flavor i've just really learned to love that if you're going to use other types of salt make sure you never use iodine salt never the fish are full of iodine already and when you add iodine salt to it you can actually overdose yourself on iodine so don't do that salmon are already a good natural source of iodine now i make sure my brine was good and mixed up i always keep an extra spatula ready to go and i mix it up and then as i'm cleaning the fish i start throwing them into the brine i make sure that each fillet section is separated so it is not clumsy here and then my table i'm going to keep it clean so i'm coming right back for a hose down every time between each one i cut i clean it up again and that way i'm always slime free and scale free and all that as i go as i'm doing my next fillet the first one the first one is already sitting in the salt now i'm you i'm going to make a half smoked version of jarred salmon so that means i'm only smoking it halfway through and then i'm going to be placing these in jars and adding other wonderful things for flavor and i'll explain that in my other videos on on making brines into different kinds and there's so many kinds and i recommend trying different flavors find one that you may get from me that you you like and then start with that and then work on you know throwing a jalapeno in there for a little heat if you like heat or other flavors just turn out really good and i'll give you my top three versions in my videos but um you know feel free to to experiment and try that's how i've learned different things throughout throughout the years that i like better than others and and i tend to go a little more low salt now than before and i know a cup of salt sounds like a lot of salt to put in your brine but i'm not gonna leave this fish in the brine very long at all and that's because i'm doing the half smoke other versions you might leave it in there for 24 hours or more but on a half smoke i only need about about 20 minutes or so in the brine about the time i'm done filling this bucket with fish and then do the second bucket i'll pull the first bucket and rinse it and get it ready for the rack okay i've got a couple of fish cut up now i've put them into the brine solution which was one cup of sea salt for a half a gallon of of water and that was good clean clean filtered water take a look here i'm stirring up the pieces see what it looks like now this is my second bucket so by the time i was done with this one we can now put fish onto the racks okay we're on the home stretch my brained fish is ready to be put under racks but i must prepare my racks first this is my smoker i know it's a it's a really big one but as much fish as we process i can do about 10 salmon at a time so it was important to have the size for me but whatever size smoker you have you just got to prep it for what you have now in mine i like the thinner pieces of meat and i've got a lot of rack space so i can do that but to keep the meat from sticking it's most important that we put a little bit of oil on it or what i've got here is a little paint roller used at true value and i've used it many times you can change the rollers when they get too dirty but i've just taken olive oil put it in a little paint tray and i rub all over the racks i go that way and the opposite way because the the stainless steel chicken wire i have on here needs a coating of oil just to keep things coming off real easy on the other end when you're done smoking now whatever you do please never use galvanized or zinc wire racks that is poison and it will kill your family and yourself so please don't ever use anything but stainless or plain steel on your smoker racks very important okay now that my fish is brined i i use one of my racks as a draining rack for in my sink here and so you can see this batch there's about two and a half almost three fish in there it's been soaking for probably 35 40 minutes it's taking me a while to trim the other cut up the other pieces in the other bucket but i run two buckets as soon as i'm done with one bucket i put it on ice after cutting the fish and setting in the bucket by the time i'm done with two bucket loads which is about five salmon or so it's about the right time for the soap time for one cup of salt to one half gallon of water now i'm half smoking this salmon that's why i'm not soaking it for 24 hours in the salt grind but you'll notice i'm also just letting the water drain off on its own so remember there was very little slime very little scales in my mix because i cleaned it with the vinegar first and locked them well and now this salmon just kind of dry damp drying and look at how it's got kind of a shine on it and that's partly salt water but i'm going to put this right on the racks and it's going to air dry for an hour or so before i start smoking and that's going to bring that salt sheen right to the top and it'll be just the right amount of salt it took me a while to figure this out if i soaked it for 10 hours it'd be too salty in my jars you know how long you soak the fish each time depends on what you're doing i'm doing a half smoke on this and then jarring it and so i don't need a really intense flavor or it doesn't need to be stored after i'm done like you would a jerky type salmon and so all to be teaching different kinds of salmon but for this one here it only needed about 20 to 30 minutes in the brine and then it's ready to go and i'm not rinsing this batch like i do with most brines i use and that's because there was so little salt time that gives it a little more time as it's dripping and drying which will turn out perfect on my half smoke now that the salmon's had a moment to drip dry i just start lining it up on my racks and and in this batch i've got a mixture of silver and sockeye so i think i'm just going to work on the sockeye first and keep them kind of separated i also also go by sides okay i'm filling the rack so this one's going to be sockeye on this one and i'm kind of putting the thicker ones towards the middle makes it a little easier to to make sure it smokes well um i i sometimes do racks completely separate like big fatty ones will be on one rack small ones on the other and that just makes it easier when you're rotating them in the middle of the night or anything like that now with this half half of smoked salmon it's not so crucial because i'm not going to finish this until it's it's drying our dryer and perfect ready to eat this is only going to get smoked halfway and then it's going to be finished cooked in the jars when i jar it jarring it allows me to save it for a longer period of time it's a great item to have on your four-wheeler or in your boat with you and you can have a lunch anywhere in some gorgeous place and it's just nothing more special than eating your own salmon sitting on a four-wheeler on the beach in the middle of nowhere okay my sockeye rack is done isn't that pretty that's like candy now i'm gonna put it in the smoker to air air dry i'm gonna put a fan on not only keeps the bugs off but it also also gives me a nice little skin on it rack number two is done this one's all silver the silver salmon also known as a coho it's a little now it's ready for some air drying you can see the fan going in there i know this looks like quite a clutter i've got a radio underneath my plastic there i have fans on the walls and i use a traeger grill for my smoker so i've got a great big traeger in there it's a pie pellet filled pellet fired grill and i'm burning nothing but alder salmon deserves nothing but older alder is always the wood of choice for smoking salmon in alaska it leaves a nice sweet smoke flavor my smoker's eight feet tall eight feet wide four feet deep and with the traeger grill you have lots of control over the amount of smoke and the amount of heat through the whole process it takes many hours and lots of patience to process salmon like this but the end result is always worth it with the price of salmon today each jar is like gold to us it's a treat you won't soon forget number seven when i built this smoker i never intended to make it so big it started off as a cover to go around my grill and for wintertime cooking because this grill smokes fish so well i thought hmm then i can build my smokehouse around it so it's my heat source and the fire source and the smoke source for the smoked salmon racks here now i'm ready to turn the stove on or the barbecue on make sure it's loaded and so i just clicked the first setting which is smoke which is only going to bring the internal temperature on that grill to about 140 and since i've got the lid open and in a much bigger space it's going to produce a lot of smoke without a lot of heat so i'm going to be kind of cold smoking these fish for the first couple hours then the last couple of probably last three hours after that i'm going to ramp the temperature up once per hour and bring and try to gel some of the fat inside that meat before it comes off and then becomes jarred fish as for a jarred recipe i'd be smoking it a lot longer if it was going to be for a finished product recipe so anyway smoker's on i'm turning the fan off okay i'm working on myself next rack of silver salmon and i think i'm going to pick all the big ones the silvers were bigger than the sockeyes so i'm going to take the bigger meat first and just do a racket nothing but the bigger thicker cuts that'll make smoking a lot easier for rotating and all that kind of stuff now if i was going to finish this all the way to the end that would be even more important you see how the fat layer is right on top there for a finished product that's kind of ugly so if you flip it over a little less fat little tricks like that will make your product look really good in the end a lot of my salmon is made for friends and family so i work hard to make sure i can spread the wealth around thank you alaska for supplying our needs beautiful wow first part of this is just to get a light smoke on the meat and then uh that gives it this nice smoky flavor i'm looking for and then i slowly ramp the temperature up each hour to try to gel and and solidify the fats that are inside the salmon if you don't they'll boil out of the meat when you put them in the jars and cook them and the same process is going on if you're going to finish smoke your salmon also you're slowly bringing it up to temperature so the fat doesn't boil out and make this white goo all over your salmon it still tastes good but the more fat you can keep in the meat the richer it will taste the better the texture and the better the flavor just tips that'll help as you can see my smoker's smoking up a storm i've come out to turn the heat up a little bit on it it's been about two hours now on the smoke setting and you'll notice when i open my door there's a kind of a screen hanging down it keeps the smoke over on that side see how well it's concentrating there this is part of how i designed it all of the fish are on the racks right there and i'm gonna snake underneath here and turn the temperature up see it's showing 130 down there i'm gonna turn it up one setting and i'm gonna put a temperature gauge up on the racks up here and that'll tell me where we're at as we go on this give me a good idea where the salmon are throughout the process right now it's about putting the skin kind of the tactile skin on it and also uh just slowly bringing it up to temperature so it doesn't boil the fat out okay it's time to ramp the salmon temperature up again i've done that already twice so this is slowly congealing that fat into the salmon you can see smoke still coming out of the smoker up there when i open the doors you'll see lots even though i've on a higher heat it's still smoking the fish as it's cooking now we haven't even hit 140 up here which we're gonna hit on probably the next setting i'm hoping let me click it up one more time and we'll go about another half hour 45 minutes and then um i'll probably click it up one more time after that by slowly ramping the salmon up that'll keep that fat from breaking out of the meat and ruining your fish load well it's been about five hours since we started smoking the fish and should be ready now starting to get a little dark out so hard to light i turned the smoker off about a half hour ago and left the fan running just to cool things down you can get a look at what we've produced here you know it's dry but but still very tender inside and so now this will go into jars and we charge it tomorrow so we're going to place it on trays now get it ready for tomorrow okay i just using some cookie sheets with a little paper towel loads on there and i just carefully pull these off most of the time they come off pretty easy remember i olive oiled the racks ahead of time sure is pretty stuff even just like this now they're very close you know within a few hours of being finished just be able to eat it but right now it's fairly tender you can kind of see how tender the meat is there because we're gonna finish cooking that in this in the jar you don't want to overdo it you overdo it and then cook it in the jar it gets very dark and it can be very dry it's one of the secrets to my my salmon being more tender is the fact that i don't over cook it ahead of time rack number two this one looks like sockeye it's really dark red isn't that pretty pretty stuff i've always found the sockeye to be a little drier than the silver or the kings it's never been my super favorite but it is a beautiful fish very beautiful to look at this one's silver again not being as red look at these two trays side by side you can see the difference in the color that's the difference between number four pretty pretty i'm gonna put a layer of paper towel in between in between here that'll help stabilize the height for this i'm going to be stacking this fish up pretty high i've got quite a smoker load today the paper towels i use in between the stacks of fish not only stabilizes the stack as it grows but it also absorbs moisture when i put these trays in the refrigerator overnight what a long day it's been i started at eight o'clock this morning and it's past eight o'clock now and i'm still processing salmon so be prepared for the long haul but boy is it worth it so well we're at the end of the night we've ended up with three trays of salmon ready to be jarred so we're gonna put this in the fridge overnight tonight cool it down and then tomorrow we'll jar them up do another video on that so you can see how we're doing that process and boy what a beautiful lotus in thank you for watching alaskan man adventures if this video was helpful to you please hit the subscribe button and the like button and i really do hope to see you sometime soon in alaska

Channel: Alaskan Man Adventures

Views: 3,706

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: bEJyGbAi5FQ

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021