How To Smoke Fish | The Best Smoked Fish! | Easy Smoked Trout and Salmon

what's up everybody welcome to another angler x video today we're not on the water but we're going to be smoking some fish i'm going to show you how to smoke lake trout and this will work for trout or salmon or any kind of fish for that matter but you may have seen my lake trout video out on lake superior we got some really nice fish i'm going to show you how i smoke them and then how i prepare them to eat them but this is going to go through the process of soaking the fish smoking the fish and then preparing it to eat but i think we have a great video for you today so stay tuned i think you're going to enjoy it so when i fillet my fish i like to keep the skin on the fish and just lay it leaving the skin on flying right off the right off the rib cage take the rib bones out there is one strip of bones that gets left in the fish and we'll we'll smoke the fish right right with those bones in there but like to leave the skin on the skin side will go down against the grill and the smoker the first thing i want to do is make sure i rinse off all the fillets really well you'll rinse them when you uh initially clean the fish but you're going to do a rinse right before smoking as well i'll just run the cold water over them for a while and just kind of agitate them in the water make sure that kind of all that sliminess and any kind of blood or whatever else might be on there gets rinsed off so you have some nice clean fillets i'll kind of do this for a few minutes just until the water starts to appear a little bit clearer then i know the flavors are good and rinsed you can dump it out and continue to add fresh water so the next step is to cut the fillets into manageable pieces this will allow the brining process to get into the meat more evenly into all the pieces and then when we smoke them it'll it'll more evenly distribute the smoke flavoring as it smokes and then thirdly allow you to manage the pieces and the cooking of the pieces inside the grill so a section like this section will cook much faster than in a section up here because it's just much thinner and then here so allow you to take these pieces that are down towards the tail out sooner and then allow the thicker ones to cook so we're going to cut these pieces these fillets into three pieces [Music] [Music] now i've got my fillets all cut up i want to try and get some of the water out of the fillets now so i'm going to pat them dry on some paper towels so i'll just lay down a few layers of paper towels here and then i'll just lay the fish out on the on the paper towels just trying to soak up some of that excess moisture that way the fish will tend to pull in the moisture from the brine [Music] now while i'm letting that paper towel soak up some of that water out of those fish i'm gonna prepare my brain i'm gonna use four cups of water to one quarter cup of salt for one quart to one quarter cup of salt [Music] i always use natural sea salt no real reason other than that's what we normally have on hand at home so i'll add my quarter cup of salt to the water use a whisk stir it until the salt's all dissolved in the water i think with with smoking fish simpler is better you can add brown sugar and other flavorings to your brine but i think just salt water is the best and then the process of smoking the fish is is what makes the difference and how long you cook it and any amount of smoke you put in the right the right smoke and temperature and just the cooking time is what really makes good smoked fish and if you want to add flavors afterwards after the small fish is smoked you can start to add sauces and get creative with some recipes with smoked fish but i think the actual process of smoking the fish and brining it just keep it really simple and i think that's the way you're gonna have your best success all right looks like all the salt is dissolved set that aside i'm just going to start to lay my fillets in the in the pan i'm going to soak them in overnight i don't know if there's any special way that you got to lay them in here but always put the meat side up on the first layer [Music] i add a little bit of the water to the brain and i'll go down with the next layer meat side down [Music] a little more brine and then the final layer will go each side down okay we'll add the rest of our brine and kind of push that all down in there so all of it's submerged in the brine i'm gonna put this in the refrigerator for anywhere from 12 to 24 hours and uh tomorrow we'll be ready to put onto the grill all right our fish is done brining it's been in the refrigerator for overnight maybe 20 hours or so and we are going to prepare our grill i have a relatively inexpensive smoker from maynards but the first thing i want to do is oil up the rack i use olive oil and a brush and you can just brush that on make sure you get the racking covered well with olive oil we're going to be putting olive oil on the fish as well so i just want to make sure you get a little bit on both surfaces [Music] next thing i want to do is make sure we get a lot of that water out of the fish you can let your fish air dry on racks or you can use do what i do i use paper towels soak up the moisture essentially we're going to do the same as what we did prior to brining them we're just going to lay them out on paper towels [Music] once we've soaked out a lot of the moisture pull those paper towels off we'll lay out all those lays down side down on a clean surface [Music] pat dry those fillets skin side and then we'll apply our olive [Music] oil [Music] all right our fish is all oiled up we're going to preheat our grill my grill is a propane grill [Music] obviously there's electric you can use charcoal this one works fairly well we'll just let the inside of the grill heat up for a while make sure it gets up to about 150 degrees before we start putting the fish in okay it looks like our grill is up to temperature we'll just turn down the heat for now and start loading our fishing you want to grab a pliers so you can grab these racks you're going to want to when you put your fish on you're going to want to keep some space between the fillets if you have a lot of fish you want to efficiently kind of organize them on the rack so that you can get as many fish in as possible [Music] [Music] your smoker should come with a water tray it's time now to put the water tray in this is not actually fiji water it's just plain tap water but having some sort of bottle to dumping in is makes it a lot easier you're going to want some water on hand because it is going to dry up through the smoking process and you want to keep making sure that the water is full in there next thing we're going to do is add the wood chips i use apple chips these are from weber it doesn't matter [Music] all right our fish have been in for about an hour now our smoke has kind of dissipated so we're gonna refresh the wood and uh we're gonna brush off the fillets a little bit to get some of that liquid off the top [Music] all right the fish is looking great shake up the uh wood pile here add a little water so we're just going to keep maintaining that temperature uh 150 to 200 but when it's all said and done you want your fish to be at least 160 degrees on the inside for it to be done and doneness is really kind of personal preference if you want your fish a little drier you're going to leave them in longer if you like them a little bit a little bit more moisture in your fish then you're going to take it out sooner but it's ready for consumption when it's at 160 degrees internal temperature but like i said the amount of dryness of the fish is really personal preference and i usually go by appearance once the outside is kind of a nice golden to dark brown i'll pull the pieces out alrighty it's been about three and a half hours maybe maybe close to four hours for some of these pieces um some of the thinner pieces are looking real good i think we're going to pull them off they may still want to stick a little bit even though we did oil them up so we're gonna try and use a spatula and a fork to kind of get them up and off the grill [Music] and take the opportunity now to uh freshen up the wood a little bit it's like there's plenty of wood in there i just let me give it a shake a little more water here little sticker sections of fish we'll let those cook just a little bit longer but these tail pieces look great i'm just going to let these kind of air cool for a while then i'll put them in a refrigerator in a loosely covered container and then i'll eventually wrap them in freezer paper individually or two in a package that's that's the final product there it looks real good you can you can eat it now but it's best served cold so chill it down and then test what you've created all right guys this fish is looking done so so we are going to pull the rest of this fish off of the grill let it cool down there you have it the final [Music] product you

Channel: Angler X

Views: 25,463

Rating: 4.8736844 out of 5

Keywords: easy smoked fish, best smoked fish, easy smoked trout, best smoked trout, simple smoked fish, smoked fish made easy, fish smoking process, fish brine recipe, brine fish easy, tasty smoke fish, smoking lake trout, best smoked lake trout, smoked fish, smoke fish, smoking fish, smoke salmon, smoked salmon, smoking salmon, prepare fish, preparing fish, prepare salmon, cook fish, cooking fish, cook salmon, cooking salmon, smoker, cold smoke, delicious fish

Id: sTdNGeK0gFU

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020