Hi, I'm Amanda Haas and today I'm going
to show you how to make a side of smoked salmon on the Traeger. It's one of the
easiest things to make and the thing I love is, once you master the technique,
you'll want to do it time and time again. So I've got this entire side of salmon.
The skin is still on which is important as well and I'm gonna make a cure for it.
Now watch how simple this is. All it is brown sugar, dissolved salt, and ground
black pepper. I'm gonna just mix this up with my hands a little bit. What's gonna
happen is that all of these flavors will be infused into the side of salmon so
you'll get that sweet flavor of the brown sugar and that depth in the
pepper and then the salt is gonna help cure it as well. So I've combined my
three ingredients for the cure and now what I've done is gone ahead and lined a
baking sheet with three layers of Saran wrap all I'm trying to do is create a
wide enough space with the Saran wrap so that I can cover the fish completely
once I put the cure on it. I've got this great deep pan but as you can see,
the baking sheet works really well too. I want to take half of the cure. We'll
put it down on the bottom. You want to cure it on both sides. Now let's put the rest of it over the
top. This is one of my favorite foods and once I learned how to make it I couldn't
believe how easy it was. See how it's all covered? I really want
to cover it evenly and then we're gonna wrap this Saran wrap up around it.
Folding the edges first. We don't want anything left out. Now I'm gonna take an
identical sheet, put it on top, and we're gonna weigh this down to get all the
moisture out of the fish. You're gonna let this cure in the refrigerator for
eight to twelve hours overnight and I've already got one
curing so I can show you what's next. Of this one goes. Okay, so the salmon has been curing for
about twelve hours in the fridge let's take a look. Oh it looks gorgeous
but what I want to do is make sure to rinse all of this cure off and then I'm
gonna pat it dry and we're gonna let it dry in the fridge for about another 12
hours before we put it on the grill to smoke it. Okay now, let's start to rinse
it. Perfect. Now here's what we want to
do. You could certainly use paper towel for this but if you have a clean cloth
you can just use that instead. We want it really dry. I think that's good. Okay now
for the interesting part I'm gonna put this back in the fridge without anything
on it for 12 hours and the reason it's on a rack is because you want the air to
circulate around it too and dry it and what will happen is the proteins are gonna
come up and form this layer on it called a pellicle. That piece is really
important because when it's well covered it's going to help keep the fish itself
really moist inside but it's also gonna help trap all that smoke in when we put
it on the grill. So here we go. 12 hours in the fridge Okay, I'm gonna let it go for three to
four hours or until the internal temp is 160 So it's been on about three and a half
hours and I just checked the internal temp. It's perfect at 160. I'm just gonna
take it right off. Oh my gosh, I wish you could smell this. The smoke is incredible on it. What a showstopper but here's the moment of truth. Let's taste it. Lucky me,
right? Promise me you'll learn how to do this.
It is so delicious, so easy to do. To get this recipe for smoked salmon and more
recipes, visit us online at traegergrills.com/recipes or download the
Traeger app.
