How to brine and smoke your own salmon!

welcome to DIY Brothers I'm will and today I'm going to show you how to brine and smoke salmon this salmon is fish that I caught in the clth river just a couple days ago if you'd like to learn more about that fishing Adventure just go ahead and click right here otherwise keep watching you learn how to make some amazing salmon all right so after you've thoroughly washed your hands and cleaned the fish so everything's clean you're sure you're good to go no problems want to goe and take your filet set on The Cutting Board you'll find with filet of salmon that there are little pins that if you rub front to back on the fish you'll feel these little these little pricks those are the pin bones or the ribs of the fish you need to remove them the best way to remove them in my experience is with just a ordinary pair of Fairly Neel noose pliers keep things pretty finite there they're really small so you need to get right up in there and just kind of use the one side of the plier to LIF lift up the edge of the bone grab over the other side and lift pull away there you go that's exactly what you're looking for you can go ahead and set those aside all right so just reach in with your pliers pick out a little p pinbone there grab it with the tip of your pliers support with either side of your fingers pull out there you go little piece of bone there that little bugger very small not very tasty the reason why we're removing these now is so that when you have your smoke salmon you don't have these little bones in there every once in a while trying to choke grandma or anything just keeping it nice smooth even texture by taking out any uh any of the bones anything that might be in the way or not good okay so we're done slicing our fles down to the smaller trunks that we're going to put in the brine let's get started with that move your cutting board off to the side go ahead and grab yourself an aluminum pan kind of like this one and it's what we're going to do is a very simple brine it's just brown sugar and salt this is to cure the fish kind of suck some of the moisture out of it and also impart a little bit of a flavor and give it that little crust on the outside so at this point we're going to grab our brown sugar and our salt our ratio is 2 pounds of brown sugar to one cup of salt so we've got two cups of salt here in a measuring bowl and then we've got two two pound for total four pounds of brown sugar here we're going for a really simple brine this is a basic straightforward brine that um we're using because we're going to par most of the flavor with the smoking of the salmon instead of and the Smoky flavors instead of the like spices that you could potentially do in a brine so this is a straightforward brine go ahead and open up your baggie of brown sugar dump it in there grab your second bag of brown sugar and then dump that in there and then you want to take your salt and just pour your salt on top of sugar what we're going to do is we're going to Mush this all together and mix it all together again with clean washed hands manually until it becomes not very obvious that two different things we want to make it into kind of a singular granular deal keep it nice and smooth in it texture get break down all the brown sugar clumps scoop around the edges make sure you don't have any salt built up anywhere all right so here we have the brine mixture it's all mixed together and ready to go we're actually just going to take the pan that we have that in and slide it off to the side pan just a nice working area nice mixing place for it so we're going to do is grab another pan this is the pan we're actually going to refrigerate the Brine and salmon in so take this pan you want to take just move it over by hand move over the brine into the [Applause] pan grab a hand by hand cool and just make a a nice layer on the bottom go all right so we got a nice layer the bottom there ready to put the salmon in Salmon okay and then we're going to just lay the salmon into the brown sugar and salt mixture set it down nicely go ahe and move over both fets leaving a little space in between the filet so that the brine can surround it completely you don't want to have your f up next to each other and have parts of it treated and parts of it not doesn't really yield the result you're hoping for right moving over actually going to just turn this filet and pop it in the side there it's got a little more space there we go now what we're going to do is we're going to lay another layer of the Brine and the brine is actually going to surround it and go on top of it just grab some of the brown sugar and just make sure you get it kind of down right in those grooves where you need it right where it's in contact with the fish helps keep it as it should be moving little clumps of it where it belongs pushing it between the fish especially when the fish are close together you want to make sure you got plenty of brown sugar in there packing it in all right so we got it packed in between this sice the fish and now we're just going to lay it on top move big big handfuls of it down just making sure it's all covered pretty thoroughly through so these fillets are just about 2 pounds worth of filet so two 4 lbs of brown sugar and two cups of salt is just about the perfect amount to put this much fish into the so just kind of multiply that by as however many fish you have there you go just break up all the layers there you go smooth surface now we're going to put this in the refrigerator all right so it's the next day now we're here and we're going to wash the brine off of our salmon we want to let it cure for about 12 to 18 hours so basically overnight you can do it before you go to bed and then do in the morning like we're doing and that makes it a nice Easy System kind of a good weekend project to do so what you want to do is reach into your pan kind of dig down through the through the kind of chunky slime that will form from the salmon juices being pulled out into the sugar and salt and from the salmon juice is being pulled down into sugar and salt you're going to have uh a stiffer meat it's going to be stipper and it's going to have a a nice smooth sealing feeling it's got like a little sealed layer over there but also a little bit of granular salt and sugar still so just turn on a little bit of cool water and just rinse the outermost layer of the granular sugar and salt off like that well it's still maintaining that kind of slick sealed feeling this you'll feel there kind of a layer there that's been SE sealed from the sugar and salt being in direct contact with the fish once you've done that just go ahead and set it on the side set on a cooling rack or a spare oven rack something like that we're going to use those to smoke the salmon on as well all right so we're here our salmon has been removed from the Brine and rinsed it's dried out now took about 45 minutes for it to get to this dry State it's kind of going to be a little bit tacky still which is what you want it's still you can see the nice jelly later on the outside that's what you want in your salmon before you put in the smoker we've got our homemade smoker here this is a cheap affordable way to smoke your own Meats without having to spend a lot on smoker if you'd like to learn how to make your own just go ahead and click on the smoker if you're a mobile user however you can find in the description the last several years years we've used Alder chips we're a big fan of that we have this Alder chips starting to smoke here you can use sawdust or whatever meat flavor you like you can get a hickory or whatever you choose Alder just works really well for us let's go ahead and get it smoking this is a convection smoker as well so it's going to be moving the air around in there with our homemade smoker we find that it takes about 3 to 4 hours to reach 160° internal temperature on the largest fet which is the temperature that you want in order to make your fish safe and ready to eat so after that's done go ahead and close the lid on our smoker and now we wait thank you for watching our video I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed making it if you'd like to learn how to make your own smoker just go ahead and click right here if you want to see more awesome videos like this of more reviews adventures and projects go ahead and click right here thank you for watching

Channel: The DIY Brothers

Views: 219,070

Keywords: how to smoke salmon, How to, smoke, fishing, smoking, smoked, Smoked Salmon (Dish), Salmon (Ingredient), Klamath River (River), homemade, DIYBrothers, DIY, Brothers, cooking, fish, smoker, Brine (Ingredient), delicious, tasty, best, awesome, alder, jerky, river, 2013, recipe, smoked salmon recipe

Id: DKwc8XFX89Q

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2013