How to Cold Smoke Fish Primitive Preservation

today we will be showing you some long-term survival skills specifically had a cold smoke and cure some of your meats and forage vegetables along the trail now we're going to be using this stone oven right here we built this several weeks ago very effective very efficient if you have any questions about how to put together how it works go ahead and click the link above in short though the fire goes down here this creates the heat that you need and a little bit of light you're having Apartments right here this is where you bake and cook any of your meals we cook several Simpson works really well today we're going to be expanding the functionality of this oven though we're going to be building a oven rack over the top a drying rack a cold smoking rack in order to use the smoke that escapes from the seven whatever is being used we'll be able to put lots of our foodstuffs above here the smoke will come up cure and actively preserve it so we're going to show you that from start to finish step-by-step let's go ahead and get to it for the first stage of the build we've got to put together a tripod and the idea is that you're going to get three poles of fairly similar diameter length make sure that they are Green poles they're from live trees because you don't want this thing to catch fire when you are preserving your food you're also going to want some cordage I use quarter inch sisal use paracord whatever you got and we're going to go ahead and put a tripod lash on this right now you can do it however you want wrapping the rope around but if I'm going to do something out in the wilds I might as well do it right so check it out start with a clove hitch in with the clove hitch three wraps to frapps that's the idea there we go on the next step tripod is centered we've gone ahead and put some rocks around each of the three poles to make sure it doesn't slip but at this time we're going to go and put some cross members in as well as some the support structure for the racks use your green wood make sure that it's not going to burn we're going to be putting these in horizontal lashing them all the way around that will further stabilize the tripod as well as give a surface to drink meet over on top of or hang from so make sure that you're not too close to the fire too close to the heat source you want your meats and your foods up high or just a smoke the cool down smoke is wafting through them so that right there is where we're going to do it for this rack you can get multiple racks if you want to enter a while but first set let's be ready guess go ahead and fire this thing up in the morning today is our day we've gone ahead and started to season our oven we've got a small fire down here we'll slowly bring that up and build our coals and hopefully get a little bit of the moisture that's retained within this rock to evaporate before we really get going be very selective in the wood that you're going to be using for smoking today we're using a mesquite any air fruit-trees well this do your research find out what kind of smell what kind of flavor you want there's probably a tree for you you do want to stay away from your toxic and poisonous trees and any of your sappy or resinous trees so any of the Buckeye and your mountain laurel pine trees you want to steer clear off we'll go ahead and get this thing going prep our fish tom start today the meat that we're going to be cold smoking is shed and shad is usually known as a bait fish but if you're surviving meat is meat these guys get pretty large we let him eat long enough now there are very thin and skinny fish we've gone ahead and clean them out we've gutted them so there's no more organs on the inside at this point you want to go ahead and wash any of the stuff that you're uncomfortable with putting your mouth out of the fish because after this there will be no more alterations it's going to be salted and put on the smoker in just a moment the salt I'm gonna be using today is kosher salt and I like that because it has the least amount of additives at least for what I can get easily if you want to keep that pretty peak color of the flesh on the inside you can use things like pink salt has lots of nitrates you can even use I'd and I salt or table salt it doesn't actually stick as well but it works if you are in a pinch but the idea is that we salt every portion that we can get to and that will help them lead rhyming preserving process so we've got a head started to hang up our fish for the smoke and what we're using our green twigs and this is from a mesquite tree still alive I wanted to make sure that it could still break over but not snap and that's for a good reason now this piece is the top of a limb so right here this is a y clip this one short this one long and there's a reason for that so I'm going to bend that over just like that I'm gonna take my fish and it might be easier or harder depending on the fish's mouth size but you're going to go ahead and take that bent over end and put it into the fish's mouth and that's going to go down into the digestive tract all the way down the throat it's not very elegant but it works out and you're going to push it down there where that barb actually hooks okay just like that and that's the idea from there you can go ahead and take it over to your dehydration rack your cold smoking rack and hang it wherever you need to hang it okay you'd benefit to having these hooks is that you can pull them off you can vary the highest if one's getting too much heat or not enough smoke you can move them around works out pretty well compared to some of the other methods I've seen we'll go ahead and do this to all the fish hang them up and check them back every 30 minutes to add wood to it make sure the fire is going good will for some more stuff up and see what else we can put on here might as well get the most juice out of it it's always burning doing a little bit of forging down by the river and our water is up this year it's looking pretty good but we've come down here to get wild onion and while I was crawling down the bank I came across this that's your nice little water snake shed so lots of reptiles down here lots of life this ragweed gives pretty good cover but we've what we've come for is this wild onion and it's pretty easy to get at it's doing really well very healthy pretty soon these are going to flower out all the way we want to get them before they completely flower before they get to it too much further along but we'll go ahead and dehydrate them over the cold smoker just as we're doing everything else and that ought to preserve them for just a little bit longer depending on your soil type you might actually have to go and dig these guys out I've got a lot of sand here around the the river area so if you're lucky and you hold your mouth right you can go ahead and just gently coax them out of the ground and you'll have you'll have your green onion that you pay sixty 70 cents for at the supermarket and we'll get a few bundles of that cooked onion gives you lots calories caramelize as you have sugars if you cook it right and consume it but it'll keep you going give you more we'll go check back up on our fire so I get it started a couple pounds onions getting cleaned up and put on the cold smoker bringing those onions back we come across this guy and this is a Spanish dagger yucca and the bloom is magnificent now these are usually edible if they get too far gone they've been up here too long they start to get a bit bitter go ahead and get a taste real fast trim not wasting my time these things are fantastic though crispin good to go well luna the size of it and these each of these leaves is really against really wide there's no way i could eat all of that so we're gonna go ahead and cut that down there's dozens and dozens of more of them out here on the land and now we're also going to be hydratase see if i can't get to it without putting too many extra holes in something more for the cooker all right ten more pounds of food it is now the second day and the Sun is setting these fish these vegetables have been cold smoking for almost 36 hours straight and they've come a long way I want to go ahead and show you the progress of the shad we're going to continue smoking throughout the night just to make sure everything is all the way done take a look at that it should be stiff as board just like that you're looking for dry dry jerky the smells coming from this fish it shouldn't be any other than maybe the wood smoke that you've been using so no rotten no fishy smells that's the idea whenever you move it you should hear that crunching sound that'll be the bones and the chrismas of the skin I'm going to go ahead and continue smoking this as well as our onions and our yucca and we've gone ahead and moved our onions they're taking advantage of that heat rock so that's slowly leeching the moisture out of them now when you're done with this storage needs to be in a cool dry place ideally you're going to actually pack your fish and vegetables in salt so just alternate layers of salt fish salt fish and they ought to keep for months and months bit of caution concern and advice now after you've stored these understand that you must cook them wash out that salt make sure that you cook them all the way through they're not cooked they are only preserved also this demonstration that I've just undertaken is that of an old old technique all right there's a reason back in the day people didn't live as long as they do now we have new and modern techniques that work much better at inhibiting microbial growth at keeping you from getting sick so only only take upon this process in dire need you want to be very very sure of what you're doing and you want to be very cautious but know the risks associated with performing this act as far as the structure is concerned I would definitely tweak it and change it around first off location make sure that you are at a sheltered area we're out here in the open so we are at the whims of nature itself anytime the wind blows my smokes not going to be where it needs to be anytime it rains the rain is going to come down upon it so you can either push this up against a wall build a wind screen do something to keep that wind from blowing and messing this up one way around that back in the day was to actually take a wet piece of material perhaps a large hide and wrap it around this teepee structure and what that would do is concentrate your smoke and make sure that it funneled exactly where you need it to go worked out pretty well all in all guys have fun out in nature like and subscribe and as always till next time

Channel: Bob Hansler

Views: 826,383

Rating: 4.8472977 out of 5

Keywords: Bob Hansler, Survival skills, bushcraft, wilderness survival, food preservation, primitive cooking, primitive food preservation, smokeing food, cold smoke, how to smoke meat, how to smoke fish, how to cold smoke meat, how to cold smoke fish, how to cold smoke, how to preserve fish, dehydrate meat, teotwawki, shtf, prepper, how to cure meat, how to salt cure, food preservation methods, colds smoker, cold smoking, cold smoke salmon, campfire cold smoke, dif Fish smoking

Id: 1beLnpi57jA

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2016