How to Dry Brine Salmon and Trout for Smoking

hey there guys today I'm going to tell you how to brine salmon or trout using a dry brine and preparation for smoking and then I'm going to do a second video I'm going to show you how to actually smoked salmon our trout using the Big Chief smoker it's a very simple and affordable smoker and all you need is to set aside an afternoon and you can cook up your own delicious smoked salmon or trout so to begin with you need to use a good quality salmon or trout or any other oily fish - like whitefish also works really well for this you can even smoked tuna and tuna bellies but what you do need to do first is you actually need to freeze the meat that you're going to smoke now this seems counterintuitive to using fresh meats but the reason is is when you freeze the meat it actually breaks up and fractures those cells and allows the brine to penetrate the salt and sugars to penetrate and pull the moisture out and actually set up the meat better for smoking so throw your meat in the freezer for a few days if it's fresh before you smoke it today I'm going to use some fresh caught chinook and coho salmon from Berkeley sound on the west side of Vancouver Island they've already gone into the freezer and come back out and I've thawed them you really want to use higher quality meats a lot of people will try and smoke like spawned out fish and things like that because it does in fact mask the flavor but if you take really high quality meat and smoke it your in and get even better quality smoked tastes so I highly recommend using higher-quality firmer meats if you can ok let's get started so here I have my salmon fillets and now I need to slice these up I want to go about an inch to an inch and a half thick if you leave bigger pieces then it's harder for the dry brine to penetrate the meat so I like to try and just cut it like this across into more manageable pieces this also allows the smoke to have a bigger surface area to attach to and I'm looking for pieces like that right there so I'm gonna go ahead and quickly do that for the Chinook for the coho I might actually go a little bit wider simply because the fillets are a little bit thinner but not too much okay so let's talk about the dry brine itself this is actually the easiest part of the recipe and all you have to do is follow this simple rule which is three parts brown sugar here I'm using a dark brown sugar you can use the light brown if you like three parts brown sugar to one part non-iodized salt you can use either canning or pickling salt or kosher salt that's all you need is to get those two you can actually just use this brine without any other additives and it will turn out pretty darn good just mix the sugar and salt together very well and then you'll lay your fish in that which I'll show you in just a sec but I like to spice things up a little bit I might add a couple tablespoons of soy sauce to give it a little bit more of a kick and then there's a whole bunch of different spices that I like to use like dill weed ginger powder let's see what else we got here black pepper if I want to kick it up you can use cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes garlic powder is also another good one mustard powder complements salmon very well and lemon peel also helps out too especially with fish that have a little bit stronger fishy flavor say they might be a little bit freezer burn or something like that the acidity and that will help a little bit so in general I'm only going to add 1 to 2 tablespoons of each of these ingredients this if you really want to kick it up you know 2 tablespoons of crushed red pepper or cayenne pepper is really going to give you a spicy cure or you can dial that back as much as you want or completely leave it out so let's go ahead and get this brine mixed up and then we'll get the salmon into the dry brine okay so I'll go ahead and add the brown sugar in there and the salt we want to mix this up really well so that they're evenly blended break up those big chunks if you can of the sugars and salt just want a nice good dry mix and even distribution okay next time I go ahead and add my preferred ingredients which is tablespoon of dill weed about the same amount of mustard so a couple tablespoons of garlic powder one tablespoon lemon peel and black powder or black pepper black powder this is gonna be explosive all right I'm gonna mix that up and that dry brine mix is ready to go okay now when we're gonna brine the salmon you want to do this in a nonreactive container that is either glass or plastic I know a lot of folks have actually used their crispers they'll pull the crisper out take all the vegetables out of it and clean it and use that to dry brine in it does make a sugary salty mess so make sure it's not something that's gonna leak alright so the first thing you want to do is you want to go ahead and put a little bit layer of that brine across the bottom just covering the bottom of your container and then you want to add your first layer of fillets you want to leave a little bit of gap between them so that the different brining mixes can get down inside there so I got that laid in there now I'm gonna lay in some more dry brine you don't have to like drown it but you want a good even coating on it before you add the next layer and you want to keep doing this working you're way upwards till you have all of your salmon covered so next you want to put the salmon in the dry brine in the refrigerator for about 24 hours if you're doing thinner cuts of fish like kokanee or smaller trout twelve hours is probably sufficient unless you want a candied version of the trout or kokanee if you want a candy or make a jerky like salmon then you might want to go up to 48 hours otherwise shove it in the fridge and close the door and let it rest all right now that's been in here 24 hours we're going to pull it out okay so when we pull it from the fridge I'm after being in the brine for 24 hours it's gonna feel very firm to the touch almost jerky like and it'll be in this soupy mixture this is all the moisture that's been drawn from the salmon and the salt and sugars have penetrated the meat so now what we need to do is pull these out and put these on racks to dry and form what's called the pellicle but we'll need to scrape away any sort of crystallized sugars or salts that we might see on there especially the me towards the bottom will tend to have some of it [Music] so after you remove the fish from the dry brine in the frigerator you need to let it air dry you can put that I like to put it on these trays here and I'll put a little bit of canola on there so they don't stick Oh wipe off most of that salt and sugar like I showed you and then I let them air dry until they have a tacky sticky surface on them I'm you don't want to be wet you wanted to be sticky that's called a pellicle and it's absolutely critical in getting that smoke to bind to the fish during the smoking process it can take one to two hours for that to form and drier climates at room temperature whether it's lower humidity it might take several more hours and more humid climates so after I got that pellicle formed your fish are ready for smoking now there's a bunch of different smokers on the market so in this next video that I'm going to post a link to at the end of this one I'm going to talk about how to smoke them in my Big Chief smoker behind me here it's a very simple economic smoker that I like to use I use this in combination with my oven to produce consistent results time after time and easily if you have a different smoker you'll have to follow that smokers directions if you like this video be sure and hit that like button and hit that subscribe button so that you can keep up-to-date with the content that I'm producing here at spilt milk productions as always I'm going to put links to any other products that you see here below if you have any questions about dry brining your trout or salmon just let me know and the questions in the comment section below and I'll give you a hand otherwise I'll either see you in the backyard next time or out on the water have a good one catch lots of fish and enjoy your catch at the dinner table see you guys

Channel: Spilt Milt Productions

Views: 25,884

Rating: 4.9087453 out of 5

Keywords: recipe, tutorial, how to, do it yourself, at home, cooking, eating

Id: 8FDMm_7l4_A

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019