How to Make Smoked Fish Strips Yukon River Style - Stan Zuray

Hey okay here we're going to cut a king salmon into fish strips and got a fillet that's been all prepared down on the beach and we're going to rip it now and prepare it for cutting into strips so this ribbing just so the fish holds together better while we're transporting it up to the table up here for the people to cut in this case I'm doing everything here because everybody is I'm the only one at camp here so at the moment so you know we leave the ribs on where we cut them down on the beach I'm already kind of making a little bit of a mess of this one a little bit trying to film at the same time I'm doing everything so so this Pat these ribs here then taken off you want to leave as much of the flesh on the fillet as you can that's the whole idea here and go around the fin there and then just leave everything else on it and those will go up on a on a rack right behind me and they'll get dried to the dogs so now get the fillet all prepared to add strips and the night be shot hopefully as we pretty shaft for this so on this first cut I want to leave lots of make it a really wide up at the top there so so where the strips go over the pole they don't break and fall on the ground so you make sure you leave lots up with the tail there and then just cut your first trip and don't worry about how they look because after a couple of days drying they all look good and the idea is especially in weather like this is not to cut them too thick because you want them to dry not was a nice sunny day and not raining like today you could cut them a little thicker and get away with it but you got to always keep in mind the weather that you got at the moment and the type of weather you're going to have for the near future so I'm cutting these a little bit thinner than I'd maybe cut them sunny out I'm going to be setting for a bunch of days so come right down and we got a bone line in here and some people cut the bone line out entirely I usually leave in some of the bones like I've already cut into it a little bit and then when it gets so you can cut the bow line off without taking much meat off at all I'll cut out the remaining bone line some people leave the all the bones in and that's fine too whatever it's all personal preference they are pretty sharp everybody who's eating a lot of strips has gotten so much I've gotten some bones jammed in my gums pretty bad before it's not fun so then okay so then as you moving down towards the belly here you start moving your cuts down with it and the the key here is to leave enough meat that you know you can have like two strips connected two strips connected two strips connected to trip's connected and then as you get down towards the end here you just keep track of the strips and so we got 2 2 2 2 2 2 because everything's in pairs and I'm going to cut two more small strips here and then I'm going to take his last pot and make like what I could recall and if a belly now people do the belly is all different some people spend actually quite a bit of time on the belly and they leave these pins connected on there and but I'm not I just cut my bellies into strips and all these pieces here this is what I call lunch this is a every day when I'm cutting all these little pieces you cut off that's a that gets thrown in the Brian PN here pretty soon and going to be lunch and these things you can you can dry them just like that or you can put these little cuts in them help them dry a little faster and kind of nice when you're eating them you just pull off a little chunk so you know yep so now you cut the strips off in pairs if you want strip to go over the poles now you got to take off a little bit of flesh if you don't that meat that goes over the pole will attract flies and it'll keep the skin from drying and you have more strips dropping and and see that path that goes over the pole is just going to be skinned now that's nice and wide you know you don't want anything than that and that's a strip that'll go they'll hang over a pole just like that so I just do that to all these go through them all take off a little bit of meat there lunch and yeah it's a daily thing sometimes when the whole camp is cutting everybody have a little pile act like that it'll be something cutting here my wife usually and then one of the kids cutting here and maybe sister lot faith cut in there and Joey and Sam cutting over there in that table or erielle or Kaitlyn yep we'll all be everybody will come up with a little pile like that and put their piles together and just cook them in the frying pan at lunchtime or supper yeah so that's how that's how we cut strips for king salmon and it's all people fooled all king salmon is made into people food the scraps like I say those ribs there those a lot go to the dogs and the backbones I got a couple hanging back here that'll be people food but the backbones are kind of half dog food half people food depends on you know how good a quality they are and you got to boil those you don't get much meat off of those things there's not much left on the backbone after we fillet it and and that's this is the last trip good now take them all put them in our fingers like that and then I'll right behind me here I put them on the brine bucket and I'll just leave those in there and this is a batch that I just did a little while ago these have been in the brine for the length of time it took me to do that last fillet and they're all salted and I will take them and put them in on a pole and then over on the fish rack there I'll spread them out about an inch and a half of pot and just let them dry for about one day in the Sun or in a rainy day like this hopefully you get a little way we do have some breeze here and so it's not too bad it's not like those dead calm days people don't even like to cut on those when the weather is going to be like that it's definitely a little tricky right now on the weather so if worse comes to worse I can put them in the smokehouse and put them right above the smoke stove and kind of force dry them a little but that's not the preferred way so I'm going to put these over on the rack okay we're going to go into smoke out here so yeah this is uh everybody's fish it all is Joey's fish up there Kate and Ariel is there and and Donald's their ID face there Kathleen's there with run Alana fish we're actually in the process of getting all this fish dry and out of the smokehouse I'm just doing some late king for myself now that everybody's gone this is actually the first King I've been cutting for the season have been camp maintenance man that's what I am that's right call myself all summer I sharpen knives I fix things that are broken I run the wheel I catch the fish I head and got them bring the filets up top and everybody else cuts their fish strips and and and I just we camp maintenance man but I like strips a certain way and so that's what all these strips are about here I cut some strips so I have some scripts that I can do what I want with for the summer so I'm going to yeah I think that's a good enough a little bit of in-depth here on the cutting of king strip store and king season and dog food and all that I got a video on my youtube channel that's how to cut dog food and and you can go and see that that's a whole different process all right thank you very much bye-bye okay here are some tips some learnt the hard way some just things have found out some people told me about anyway this one after you hang your strips just kind of take a claw touch the tops of them now the weather has gotten sunny here but in damp weather if you don't get those places where those two strips connect over those poles if you don't get them dry they're going to start dropping it's going to stretch that skin and you go start dropping so you take your take a cloth and just tap them a little bit dry and it can make all the difference in the in damp weather it's just just a little tip that's all that one is okay here's another tip this is standard practice everybody does this see how these strips are stuck together kind of wet and you know stuff like that maybe it get a little coat on the outside there but where they're stuck together it's all white and wet while you do just turn all your strips the next day you might even have to do this one more time turn your strips and we'll sit a pot like that because you don't want that sitting together like that stuck because the Flies will get in there and it'll sour and see another hanging just right what you do is just just turn that tail a little bit for weak tail section there yeah like I say you may have to them the next day these things aren't really drying that good it's really wet weather here and may even have to sit out for two days here before before we get them all done and get a good coat on to bring him in the smokehouse so ok his nuggets say you cut the cut one of the strips off at the tail wrong and you end up with a single strip like this well real simple cut out a little recent thing like that there you go you got a strip ok another tip say you're cutting the tails you're being real careful and then you kind of go too far and you cut it off or the strip at night breaks at the tail and falls off next money clean the strip off put them together like that and a lot of people have trouble with this they use heavy rope you want to use light rope so it'll cut it in put a double knot two knots just like you do on a package bow on a present or something like that put two knots and then one to hold it good to go strip it we'll go over a pole and it won't slip out like I say if you use big rope over and over again I've seen people use bigger bigger twine and they and they just keep falling on them okay got a bunch of strips that are going to go in the Rhine bucket and this is the brine bucket and it's got one hundred percent salt solution in it and I'll soak the strips in there for two to three minutes and and I like the hundred percent salt solution because it's real easy as long as you got salt down the bottom of that bucket you know that that's a supersaturated solution 100 percent salt solution in the brine and doesn't take a lot of water in there but I you screen like this and you get a little bit of fish pieces in there and every now and then just kind of clean them out and I'll change my buying everyday but there's no sense it's not like 100 percent salt solution is going to be rock over the course of a day or anything like that or just keep cleaning it out like that and that's the brine do you dokey you know do all sorts of things on people just for 20 years we just dumped the strip's in the thing and sorted them out in the end this year I've been using this wire my wife's been use a little stick and limp sitting there three minutes two minutes three minutes and then just lift them out and hang them for a little bit and they drain for a lot of years we used to use this thing here put it in the bottom of a big five-gallon bucket here and you know just let the strip's drain that way carry the bucket over to the racks and hang them up over there all sorts of ways to deal with that that method and lastly if you're going to strip for the first time the best thing to do is start with a little fish and lately on the Yukon that's we got lots of little fish there's actually very few big fish around at all haven't seen a fish over 27 pounds all summer long so you know you used to have fifty pounders here but with genetically modified to run so you get a lot of these little fish and they are the ticket for learning on because they are fast like on these little fish I don't even worry about the bone line the bones are so small you can whip them out pretty fast so if you try this you can probably do this with just about all sorts of fish I would imagine and it's all sorts of brides and fancy recipes and stuff that you can use but if you want and that's it so thank you good luck

Channel: Stan Zuray

Views: 344,680

Rating: 4.8265333 out of 5

Keywords: Smoked Fish, fish strips, King salmon, fishing, Yukon, Yukon River, Stan Zuray, Yukon Men, Yukon Men TV, Tanana, Carry On, Alaska

Id: yRPcinT0vkI

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017