How to Preserve Salmon | Brined, Smoked & Canned

welcome to the channel eric and i are doing a bunch of canning today and we are candy none other than salmon here we are we've lived in alaska for four years and we've been canon salmon for about three of those years so we've got it narrowed down to the exact way that we like to do it we're gonna be sharing that with you guys today we've had the opportunity to can lots of salmon and we have done it so many different ways we have raw packed salmon we have brined it and then candy and we have smoked it in candid our favorite favorite way is brined and smoked or just smoked that's it's awesome just like that and it's a team process with us i've never done all this on my own neither has ariel so we work together she's better at some things i'm better at other things so it's going to be kind of like jumping back and forth between who is doing what here so if you're wondering why would you can salmon maybe it's obvious maybe it's not the reason we can salmon is for storage just 100 well actually i lied it's actually for flavor and storage so when you can salmon it's storability or shelf stable it is i mean it's indefinite basically so we've had salmon obviously no older than a few years but it does still taste good and it can last longer than that it can last decades once you pressure can it properly so it's awesome to have that precooked and ready to go you don't have to cook it again you can just eat it right out of the can yep and if you store it in the freezer it tastes good in our opinion for like six seven eight months then it starts to get a little fishy canned salmon the day you can it a couple years later it's gonna taste exactly the same there's so much opportunity to add like spices and flavors and things you like create it the way you want it so this is kind of our opportunity to do that today yep and today we are using silver salmon so this is one big fillet out of a silver salmon we just caught down in valdez we caught 24 fish so we've got our work cut out for us today we're gonna be canning up just an awesome amount of fish let's pull it out of the freezer take a look at what we got and we're gonna get started okay this is one of our five gallon buckets of salmon fillets we have two of these we're doing today there's all different kinds of ways that you can actually cut your fish to put it in jars most of the time we like to get as much fish in a single jar as we can so the way we found works for us is we'll take a whole entire fillet just like this one we'll brine it smoke it we'll peel it off the skin and we'll pack it in the jars a great method we're going to be doing that today with probably over half of these and then the leftovers we're actually going to be slicing them into strips and we're going to be leaving the skin on those ones and packing those in the jars for this recipe all of the fish is going to be treated the same way so we're going to brine it in salt and sugar we're going to be smoking it we're going to be putting it in jars with jalapeno and garlic we already have one salmon fillet prepared here and it's very simple to do and that's because you don't need to remove the bones so when you pressure can salmon all the bones are they're gonna pretty much just disappear so we've got the skin on this one we've got the belly attached to it we've even got a little fin these are the ones that we're gonna be using whole so i'm gonna start packing these in our five gallon bucket and we're gonna work on our brine we're doing a dry brine today and that means we're not using liquid so we've got four cups of salt here this is kosher salt we're using and we've got some white sugar basically what we're gonna do since we have such a big batch of fish is i'm gonna layer fish on the bottom of this five gallon bucket i'm gonna do salt and sugar i don't have an exact measurement i'm just gonna kind of completely coat the fish then i'll do another layer of fish and another layer of salt and sugar and what this brine is going to do is it's going to flavor the fish it's going to firm up the fish it's going to pull moisture out of it and all these are going to add to just an excellent end product for us so we're doing an even mixture at least i am same amount of salt as i am doing the sugar you can do different things in your brine too you can do brown sugar you could do different spices whatever you want to do we're just doing the salt and sugar but this is a nice big filet right here and something like this you're going to get probably two jars of canned salmon so gonna get a lot of jars there's a big bucket of salmon so whoo so this one's full and the next batch which is almost a full five gallon bucket we're gonna be slicing that one up so we're gonna clean these ones up a little bit since we're gonna be putting them into slices and the reason we're gonna be slicing these ones is you're gonna get pretty much a different end product when you actually go to eat the canned salmon so these are gonna have skin on they're gonna be in chunks so when you take a jar you can take it with you like on a snack or out camping or something you open the jar and you can just pull out like one big chunk of salmon you can eat it straight out of the jar the other type we do where we just pack it in the jar you can eat it just out of the can you're probably gonna need like a fork but that's usually more for like making recipes so i got the belly sliced off this one with a little fin we're also gonna be brining and smoking that and we'll just come down here we're gonna cut nice chunks just about like that so [Music] we've got our first layer in there salt and sugar on them and we're gonna go until we've got these all sliced up look at this one that's a big one okay cool there we go we're gonna let these ones sit for 24 hours so we've done it longer and we did that when we made candy salmon a couple years ago if you let these go a lot longer like the 48 hour mark you're going to get a really firm fish but you're also going to get a lot of saltiness flavor and you're also going to get a lot of sweetness so we don't want too much these are going to go for 24 hours we're going to put this bucket and the other one in the ice chest and we will see you guys tomorrow morning we'll show you what it looks like well good morning everybody it has been exactly 24 hours we're ready to move on with our salmon so this has been in here overnight in the brine and there was no liquid in here when we put that brown here it was a dry brine as you can tell there is just a ton of liquid that that salt and sugar has pulled out of this meat not only that but the meat has firmed up a significant amount it's also shrunken down quite a bit next step we're going to take one of these buckets because i'm pretty sure it's going to be two batches on the smoker this is a lot of fish we're going to take it over we're going to get cleaned up get this brine all rinsed off we've got this little rack that we use for lots of different things today it's getting used for cleaning salmon so all we're going to do is we're going to take our hose and we're gonna rinse these down get all the salt and sugar off of them and you could easily do this inside in your kitchen sink but we're gonna do it outside today so we've got the smoker all loaded up and is looking good today we built the smoker almost four years ago it's built out of pellets and old metal roofing but it works good for us it does run pretty hot so we're only gonna be smoking this fish for like two to three hours it's gonna cook it a little bit that's gonna be just fine at this point you can add your seasonings we're only doing pepper we already did the brine that had salt and sugar in there but you can do whatever you want you can do lemon pepper garlic whatever you want to do let's get our pepper on there we're going to start a fire we're going to start smoking some salmon [Music] we've got a nice hot little fire going with our kindling and we're gonna start smoking our meat we either use alder or birch today we're using birch i've got some nice big chunks cut up we're gonna throw these on here and get the door on [Music] that amount of wood for us usually lasts about an hour so we'll see an hour and we'll check on the meat getting there it's been an hour and a half the fish is starting to firm up nicely it's no longer like wet like a fillet would be let's load her up with some more wood i'm guessing three hours on this bat should be plenty perfect that is what i am after it ended up going for close to four hours and i want the fish to be like semi-cooked i don't want to be when you push on it it's like a raw fillet you want to have firmed up which this one has it's shrunken down it's like oozing out all this beautiful juice these are done so we're gonna pull these all off and we're gonna get them in a bucket oh my gosh look how big that fillet is okay full flays are off we're putting on our little strips we're gonna do pepper on these also and these should take a little less time to smoke since they're smaller pieces we're gonna start canning up our salmon another full load our salmon looks great but it is not quite ready to eat and that is because it is not fully cooked so something that we don't really like to talk about that much i know is worms when we are talking about food but salmon does often actually have worms or parasites that is harmful if consumed raw these fish are not actually cooked all the way even though they have been brined and smoked you would have to have it in your freezer for like two weeks something like that to make sure that the worms are dead or you can cook it thoroughly which we are going to be doing by pressure canning it today and pressure canning is really simple for fish you actually just need fish a pressure canner and jars there's a few other little items i have we have our ingredients that we're going to be putting into or adding into this recipe we also have some canning tongs i have a canning little jar funnel but i don't know if we're going to use this and if you're not using brand new jars you would want to have some of the lids and you'd want to have bands as well another thing i've got here is vinegar and a towel useful to have that on hand we have got to get some of our ingredients chopped up so we can get this jar each jar of salmon is going to have a hefty dose of jalapenos we've got some minced garlic and we also have some herbs from the garden eric and i like to use minced garlic it is somehow more flavorful in my opinion because what happens when you pressure can is some of that aroma gets lost under that high pressure so we find that this actually will give you a better end product and we only grow so much garlic for ourselves so i don't actually have enough to include in these right we're doing 32 jars but we're gonna do one for demonstration purposes so we get a good idea of what it looks like we like to can our salmon in pint jars so we have a cleaned pint size jar here and all i do for cleaning these is just rinse these with some warm soapy water it's that simple if you have a dishwasher running them in there is fantastic but we don't have one of those so we've got our jar got our lid and our band and we're gonna be putting all of our ingredients at the bottom so no specific herbs we just put a little mixture i think i have some savory oregano and sage in there i'm gonna put a few jalapenos a nice scoop of garlic and this is totally where you can add whatever you want so use your imagination as spongebob would say and put whatever you want in there we're going to grab our fish and the first step is to kind of just like peel it off the skin you can see the bones are still in there those are going to dissolve so we do not need to worry about that and you can can with the skin as well we just this this method we like to just pack it in there so i'm going to be kind of squishing down little chunks of fish in there to get more to get more in there that's about it that's about it right there about two-thirds of this fillet so that's a good amount we're gonna be making a lot of salmon today this next part is something we have never personally skipped i feel like it makes a huge difference we rarely have failed seals what er can i like to do is wipe each rim of jar before we put the lid on with some vinegar so i've got some vinegar in this jar here you can use a paper towel and what that is doing is just cleaning any residue on the rim that could prevent a seal from forming there's usually oil or sugar depending upon what you're making sometimes the spice or a little herb will get stuck there you don't want that so now we can put on our brand new lid just right on there and everything's cold i didn't mention that but the jar is cold all of this is cold the salmon is a little bit warm from the smoker i'm just going to take our band and they say like fingertip strength so you just close it but don't like really screw it i forgot to mention there's a little bit of head space you want to leave about an inch this is a little bit less than an inch you just want to make sure you have some headspace or the process sometimes doesn't work correctly you may have noticed there is no liquid in this this is actually already ready to go into the canner the fish itself will secrete a significant amount of liquid depending upon what fish you're using if you're using their bellies where they have a lot of fat so i expect quite a bit of liquid to come out of this we do not need to add any to any of these jars we've got to get the rest of these done like three this jars yeah that's 32 cleaned [Music] how many fillets have you done wow two three but one of them was one of those doubles what's lincoln do when it's gonna dissolve has anyone ever been hurt by them yeah i'm good these jars are packed and cleaned and ready to be canned eric and i thankfully have two presto pressure canners and they both fit 16 double stacks so you can double stack these and really get the most for your time you may have heard that you have to pressure can fish that is because fish itself is a low acid food item and we are also putting it in the perfect environment for bacteria to grow low oxygen so in order to meet usda guidelines you do have to pressure can it for a specified amount of time and we're going to pop open the lid of this one take a look inside i've got the rack that our pressure canner came with and then eric and i also have another rack that allows us to double deck or double stack these and you can definitely do it without those we did that for a long time but you do risk them breaking i guess you also possibly risk them not sealing properly although we didn't ever have that happen first thing we have to do is fill this up with water we want three quarts of water in here [Applause] and that's a minimum mark you want you want to have at least that in there you don't want to have that much more in there if you're gonna be canning obviously because you're gonna have displacement there's actually a little mark in there because we've used this lots of times so that is my guide otherwise you'd be measuring out three quarts of water we always put a splash of vinegar and what that does i don't know how it does it but it prevents this white fog you can get on your jars when you're pressure canning them so it just makes them look really pretty when you pull them out we've got this rack on the bottom we're going to layer in eight jars right now and the water is cold i didn't mention that but that's kind of crucial to get your temperatures correct when you're canning because the glass can be very susceptible to breakage so basically you just want the temperature of the jar to match the temperature of the water we wouldn't want to put like a cold jar into some really hot water because then we risk breakage there we go and so this part is also important as well you want to make sure that your seal is looking good ours is you just want to make sure it's not like totally old or anything or cracked we've run this hundreds of times and i think we've had to replace our seal maybe once and you also want to make sure that the air vent is clear so you just either squint and look or you can kind of blow some air through there that's another important step and we're going to be putting this on i have these little arrows here and then when we actually swivel it like that it locks so it's closed now and we're ready to start pressure canning tonight we're going to be using our outdoor stove it has been raining for the last two months in alaska so we just could not pass up this opportunity to be outdoors this stove does run really hot so it's a little bit hard to do fish because fish has a high processing time but we're going to be outdoors we're gonna just keep an eye on it like i said we couldn't pass up this lovely lovely opportunity anytime you're pressure canning consult your manual so this is for our specific pressure canner they do vary there are different types of pressure canners out there there are some that are called dial gauges which is what we have here a little dial and then there are ones that just have like a weight and those work a little bit differently they have a little bit different instructions the way pressure canners work is they have steam that makes a significant amount of pressure in here and very high heat which kills the harmful bacteria and makes your food safe it's actually something that pretty much almost anyone can do but i know a lot of people are afraid of it but there are steps that you want to do to make sure that nothing goes awry when you're canning so we are going to start the heat on this batch right now all right we got that going this takes a long time to heat up because everything is cold in there as mentioned before today eric and i are using something very cool our pressure canner came with this weight which goes over the vent pipe of course not right now but it goes eventually over the vent pipe and what that does is it stops this pressure canner from getting to like a certain point it will rock at 15 pounds but otherwise we're going off this little dial gauge to let us know to keep track of the pressure inside basically someone sent us this adjustable weighted regulator and it's adjustable because it can go to 5 10 or 15 pounds this is awesome you believe it or not it's actually a huge time saver when you're canning we're going to take off the top little ring and that's why it's called adjustable so now it is only 10 pounds and what i mean by that because it's going to keep the pressure inside at 10 pounds per square inch so psi generally when we're operating our dial gauge pressure canner we are at 11 psi but with this guy we are actually going to be running it about 10 and that's sufficient you're probably wondering why this little gadget is so special and that's because it will actually rock after it gets past 10 psi so what it does is it lets eric and i know if for some reason we've dropped in pressure inside which we don't want we need to maintain that same pressure but it also lets you know if you go past that you know you'll start to see it rocking quite a bit whereas our other one only lets us know if we surpass 15 or if we're at the 15 mark we're jumping a little bit ahead we don't actually need this yet we have to let everything heat up first we have to lent this vent for 10 minutes that's a safety step you want to do that this is the vent pipe and then this is the air lock vent cover and that is going to pop up and when that pops up and this is generating some steam we're going to put our 10 minute timer on right it is venting we can clearly see the steam but we have to wait 10 minutes before we can put this on we have our second pressure canner right here also heating up it's been 10 minutes so i'm going to add our adjustable weighted regulator and now we have to let it come up to pressure in here before we can actually start our processing time our processing time is going to be 100 minutes on each of these batches at 10 pounds of pressure normally i would have to keep an eye on this a little bit more if i wasn't using this regulator and i'd have to watch it come up to the 11 pound mark and then i would start our time but again this guy is so awesome it's gonna rock or do like a little hula dance when it gets to that point and it's actually going to regulate the pressure in there and make sure that we don't exceed the 10 pound mark i just want to reiterate that eric and i are processing these based upon our pressure canner's manual so make sure that you follow your specific guidelines for your specific pressure canner we are almost done venting on this one and then we can add our regulators all right that's the dance we're looking for so unless we have this just way cranked it's pretty much going to keep it at the right pressure in there which does coincide with our dial gauge too this is the perfect speed that i'm looking for if it were rocking a lot faster i probably would actually adjust the heat and you can see it's just letting out a little bit of steam out of that vent pipe so we're good and we're gonna start our time on this one okay so these ones are getting there like i said they're not gonna take as long to smoke because they're little thin strips but with these ones i actually like them smoked a little bit more i like to be able to pull a piece just like this out of a jar and you got a little snack size little stick here i pull the skin off and i just eat the meat so we got a little bit of birch still going in there i'm probably going to these smoke for probably another 40 minutes then we're going to pull them off we're going to start getting them canned that's the belly that hurts my eyes pressure cannons not one of those things you can just turn on and walk away from you have to constantly monitor these and what i'm looking for or listening for is this little weighted gauge to stop rocking if it does that that means it's going to fall below the 10 pounds if it falls below 10 pounds you're supposed to restart the whole thing again and we do not want that to happen this is 100 minutes these are going for so i'm just making sure that the flame doesn't blow out and the flame doesn't go too low our salmon on the smoker is officially done we're going to pull it off ariel's got some jars ready for us we're jarring up more salmon unbelievably gorgeous looking meat it's turned out great well i know it said don't eat the salmon like this but it is just too dang good it's delicious [Music] so this is the can that we have in the pressure canner we have seven more of those to go these ones we've peeled the skin off and you can fit a lot of salmon in these jars the ones we're doing now they're a little bit different but they're going to look awesome and honestly they're probably my favorite way to can them we're going to do them in strips and we like to do them with the skin out kind of like that so i like to take pieces you got to kind of puzzle them in here but one in the center and i usually try to get up one small one or something put that on top that's that you're gonna have a lot less salmon in these jars so we're going to can a little bit more but i think it's totally worth it we're going to get a 32 here going fill the pressure canners again as soon as those are done oh well that one came off the there we skin [Music] well tonight we broke the record so the most cans of salmon we've canned in one session was i believe two years ago and it's 54 jars we broke it by 10. we're almost there we're going to do 64 jars total this evening this is gonna be absolutely awesome these ones are turning out amazing it smells so good i'm really glad we decided to add the garlic and the jalapenos this time around this belly meat is just looking forward to these ones well this is gonna be a late night tonight it is 9 15. this one is done i'm gonna shut it off this part is pretty important you wanna let this thing cool okay you can't just go taking the lid off and you can't take this weight off it's gonna just shoot out all the steam your jars are probably gonna siphon you're gonna mess some stuff up so it's off we're gonna wait it's probably gonna take 40 minutes or so we're going to wait until this little plunger on the front the air valve drops all the way down and we're going to carefully take off the weighted gauge and make sure there's no steam coming out probably wait another five minutes after that then we'll be able to take our lid off all right our dial gauges are reading zero and it's been like 10 or more minutes since that lock has went down so these are safe to take off there may still be a lot of steam in there so it's nice to open up this away from you yeah there's still some steam in there it smells like salmon okay let's check these out i already hear them sealing look at that put all that liquid in there so that's the liquid that they secrete on their own and that is why you do not have to add anything to them we're going to get these pulled out we're going to put them on towels you always want to have like a surface where they can they're very hot so it's best not to just put them directly on a countertop a kitchen towel works best we have a casualty and i want to show you this because it happens i mean it it shouldn't happen that often we're using jars that are older and when i say they're older some of our jars are like over seven years old so it can happen and we're not going to eat that i'm actually going to be donating that to the chickens just in case there's some sort of shards or anything in it like that and if you have glasses break when you're canning i would encourage you to keep keep up figure out what you did wrong or what happened because it does happen i'm guessing that that was just an older jar sometimes it can be a little disheartening to see your your produce you know go like that but it happens so just be aware that it does happen so good all right round two these are the ones going in beautiful jars of the salmon with the skin on it this is very cold that water is extremely hot so we're going to dump the water out of the pressure canners refill it with some cold water okay we're in business so the ones we already pulled out those are just gonna sit over there we're not gonna mess with them they'll sit there until tomorrow morning these ones we're gonna do the exact same way we did those ones a hundred minutes when these ones are done we're gonna turn them off take them out it's going to be a late night we'll see you guys tomorrow morning right there is the final product beautiful jar of canned salmon with garlic herbs and jalapenos right now what i am doing is just running through all the jars making sure that they all sealed properly we're going to be removing the bands we don't keep the bands on in storage you can we just don't it's not necessary once the salmon has formed a seal you will not be able to open it so like if you can take your finger and pop it open something went bad like this one i'm trying with all my thumbs might and it's not popping open so this one formed a great seal of course and usually when you pull these out of the pressure canner it was a little bit late last night but when you pull them out you'll see the liquid bubbling which is a good indicator that you are going to get a seal generally they will pop down within the first five minutes and sometimes they're even pop down before you pull them out of the pressure canner if it takes over half an hour usually i feel like there's a problem sometimes you'll find that they don't pop down so you'll actually be able to like pop the the jar lid i don't have an example of that since that didn't happen but in that case you would want to eat that or put it in your fridge or you have to reprocess it because it's not it didn't form a seal it didn't work right when we jar salmon it does get a little bit messy because there's oil in the fish what i like to do when i remove the band is just wipe some vinegar on a towel and kind of clean it up for storage otherwise you get this you'll have some oil sitting on the top like that this one right now is just perfectly ready for storage a little bit of fogging on the glass that's not a big deal that's why we usually put the vinegar but this one got a little bit of that last night we did have another casualty and we realized it right away because when we pulled this jar out we could tell there was no liquid which meant something was wrong we couldn't see the crack it wasn't very obvious and then when we looked upon inspection you can see there's a nice crack like right around the base of the jar and this jar was actually sealed so you see i'm popping it now it was actually popped down with the band we removed the band and i was able to take my finger and just lightly pop it off so i guess if you weren't paying attention you could have missed this one but this one to me was pretty obvious so we will have to just eat this or discard it i'm not sure what we're gonna do with it but just again just double check your jars when they come out or after you've let them rest for a little while that's your opportunity to see if anything failed or if they worked properly all right we've gotta get these labeled and cleaned up and dated and all that good stuff there we go that's a beautiful jar right there these are all dated and ready to go inside the cabin and that's where we store them best place to store these is in a cool dark dry area we don't exactly have that but the cabin works out just fine for us one thing you do not want to do though is you don't want to let these freeze so you need to keep these above freezing freezing can compromise your seal so we're gonna make sure to keep these in the cabin above the freezing temperature and canned salmon it's one of those things that you pretty much just treat like you would a can of tuna as far as it goes to eating the stuff my favorite way is just to eat it straight out of the can but a recipe that we both enjoy a lot is salmon patties so i'll take this i'll drain the liquid add two eggs some cornmeal and olive oil mush it up into a little patty we'll fry it and have like a little salmon burger patty there's honestly just there's a ton of great ways to eat this stuff let us know what is your favorite way to eat canned salmon we'll try out your recipe thanks for watching we hope you guys enjoyed the video we will see you next time you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 247,045

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, fishing in alaska, cabin living, off grid living alaska, off grid cabin, alaska fishing, garden alaska, homestead alaska, alaska salmon fishing, smoking salmon, preserving salmon, canning fish, canning smoked fish, red salmon alaska, sockeye salmon alaska, copper river reds, dipnetting alaska, can fish, canning salmon, how to smoke fish, smoking slamon, how to smoke salmon, how to preserve salmon

Id: yQp2UACv3eM

Length: 34min 4sec (2044 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022