How To Smoke Bluefish - Chesapeake Style

it's summertime in the Bluefish you're standing almost every mid-atlantic fishermen I know has two recipes and smoked blue panel years so my bluefish smoking process is basically three steps first is brining the second is drying and the third is smoking and the brining is important because that's what puts moisture in your fish and it keeps you from drying out too bad when you smoke so I've got my pretty little blue fish fillets here you can see I haven't done anything on the back of them all I've done is just clean them and patted them dry with a paper towel and now they're ready going my brine so to make my bride I'm just going to put enough water in a glass bowl to cover all of my fillets and then when I had about three-quarters of a cup of kosher salt looks about right three-quarters of a cup of brown sugar and because it's Maryland lots of old bay maybe a little lemon zest you don't want to use lemon juice because it will burn your fish it actually cooks the fish a little zest in there maybe some black pepper and then stir it up it's delicious I'm going to cover all my filets and then cover my bowl and put in the refrigerator it needs to set for three or four hours but it's better if it sits overnight you can't brine it too long even if you leave it for two or three days it'll be fine the longer you leave the fish in the brine though the saltier is going to get it's already going to be salty anyway because of the next step which is the drying process the next step in the three-step blue fish smoking process is to dry your fish now I've left my fish in the brine for about five hours now and I patted it dry with a paper towel and I'm ready to put it on a drying rack which is just a wire rack with some with a cookie sheet but just make sure that you put it skin side down and then salt it they can't add too much salt because we're going to leave these out at room temperature for at least three hours maybe four hours what's going to happen is that salt is going to pull the moisture out of that fish and that's going to make it nice and dry and it will leave a kind of a coating on the top of it we call that a pellicle and that allows the smoke to adhere to the fish a lot better so you can't add too much salt and I mean we're going to spice it up a little bit here by adding some chipotle salt I got this at a local gourmet store and let's add a little bit of that a little bit of spice here now if you're worried about leaving this out you can dry it in the refrigerator but it will take a little bit longer to dry in the refrigerator better just to let it set out now since it's going to be a while this would be a good chance to start soaking your wood chips I'm using hickory chips you can use Applewood whatever you have and just cover over the water what you're doing is just saturating those chips so that when we put them on the grill later or in the smoker they won't burn up they'll just smoke and not burn so now we come to the third and final step of our smoking process we bribed their blue fish and we've dried it for four hours and now we're ready to start smoking and if you have a smoker this is real easy you can just put it on your smoker and and let it go but if you don't you can still do it on a regular charcoal grill no matter what kind of charcoal grill you have where it's a weber type or just a regular great type you can still smoke your blue fish and the way to do it is by putting your coals on one side of the grill that's your hot side and then putting your wood chips over your coals because that's what's going to create the smoke and then putting the fish fillets on the other side and the only thing you have to do is just set them down on the grill you don't have to worry about putting any oil on them or anything like that because as they smoke they're going to dry and they're not going to stick to the grill so this is going to be pretty low heat over here maybe a hundred hundred 50° at the most so there's not a lot of heat there but this smoke is going to pull over this way and give all that flavor to the Bluefish now at this point you can season your filets just about any way you want to some people like to add some old bay or maybe some more salt and pepper or something but what I like to do is add a little bit of maple syrup and red pepper flakes now the key from this point forward is patience since this side of the grill isn't very hot it's going to take a long time to smoke these filets so we're just going to close it up and forget about it for a little while and let that smoke do its work so we're about an hour into our smoking process and let's raise the grill and see what's going on oh yeah so those filets are actually cooked at this moment but we don't want cooked bluefish we want smoked bluefish but they're still looking pretty good you can see that they've got a really nice pellicle on there it's a really nice coating and all we have to do is just wait and let them get darker and smokier and more and more delicious two and a half hours in the smoke is rolling and look at those blue fish fillets three and a half hours in and we're ready to take our blue fish off the smoker thank gosh don't they look good all right so now we're ready to try our smoked bluefish you can use smoked bluefish just like you would smoked salmon or any other kind of smoked fish it's really delicious and pasta are mixed with cream cheese and chives for a dip or you can put it on bagels or toast or you can do what I'm going to do right now and just eat it like it is they don't want to eat the skin so you're going to have to take that meat off the skin and look at that look at that moist delicious bluefish it's got that really rich smoked flavor except it's also sweet and salty at the same time folks that is bluefish candy you

Channel: Shawn Kimbro

Views: 30,532

Keywords: fishing, smoking, Bluefish, (Organism, Classification), blues, chesapeake, bay, cooking, light, tackle

Id: PmWHaiwRmw0

Length: 7min 26sec (446 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 10 2014