Smoked SALMON with Cajun Honey Butter on a PIT BOSS! | Pellet Grill Smoked Salmon

hey everyone welcome to Mad backyard today we're going to be smoking some delicious salmon fillets on our Pit Boss pellet grill we'll show you step by step how to prepare the salmon with a simple brine set up the Pit Boss smoking season the salmon and then finish it with a honey glaze salmon is one of the best fish for smoking and it's especially easy to do on a Pit Boss pellet grill but there's a few things you need to know before you get started when you're looking up smoked salmon recipes know that there's a big difference between cold smoked salmon and hot smoked salmon cold smoking is more of a preservation method it involves smoking it for many many hours sometimes days at a time at room temperature without ever actually cooking the salmon it's a very specialized technique and you really need to know what you're doing in order to safely cold smoke salmon today we're going to be hot smoking our salmon meaning that we're cooking it while adding smoke flavor even though we refer to this as hot smoking we're still going to be cooking at a low temperature like other types of low and slow barbecue this will help keep the salmon moist and give it lots of time to absorb smoke flavor while we cook it on the Pit Boss when picking out your salmon there's a few different kinds to look for the kind you'll see in almost every grocery store in America is usually labeled as Atlantic or farm-raised salmon the other type is wild caught salmon sometimes labeled as Alaskan wild Cod or sockeye salmon depending where it's sourced from wild caught has a deeper redder color and is more expensive than Atlantic farm raised wild-caught salmon is delicious and if you can find it near you and your budget allows for it go for it otherwise Atlantic farm-raised salmon will work just fine and that's what we're using today before you smoke your salmon on the Pit Boss you really need to brine it brining will help the salmon stay moist on the smoker and also give it more flavor when you cook salmon hot and fast you don't need to brine it but when you're smoking it low and slow like we are today it'll really dry out on the smoker before it's done cooking if you haven't brined it we have about three and a half pounds of salmon fillets here and we brined them last night in a simple solution of water kosher salt and brown sugar bring six cups of water to a boil then remove it from the heat then gently stir in a quarter cup of kosher salt make sure to use kosher and not table salt and a three-quarter cup of brown sugar whisk and until everything's dissolved let it cool to room temperature and then put the brine in the refrigerator until it's cold if you bought an entire salmon fillet you'll want to cut it into individual portions the one we bought was already portioned out so we didn't need to do this step we prefer to cut the salmon into individual portions before smoking rather than smoking it as one big fillet this way you have more surface area to absorb brine smoke and seasoning rather than cutting it into individual portions after smoking make sure to buy a salmon fillet with the skin on one side having that skin will help the salmon stay intact and also make it easier to move around on the Pit Boss rinse the salmon under cold running water and then Pat it dry very well next run your fingers gently across the salmon fillets checking for any pin bones that weren't already removed you can use a pair of tweezers to easily remove them and pull them out once the brine is nice and cold pour about a third of it into a glass dish then place the salmon fillets meat side down pour the rest of the brine over them to completely cover the fish cover the dish and put it back in the refrigerator our brine ratio of a quarter cup up kosher salt to six cups of water is not incredibly salty so you can let it brine overnight up to eight to twelve hours at minimum you should let it brine two to four hours before putting it on the smoker the next day remove the salmon fillets from the Brine and quickly rinse them under cold running water put them on a wire rack over a foil lined baking sheet and Pat them dry with a paper towel lay out all the salmon fillets on the wire rack baking sheet combo and let them air dry back in the refrigerator for about two to four hours before putting them on the smoker during this time they'll form what's known as the pellicle on the outside of the salmon fillets this is a tacky glaze that forms on the outside of the salmon as the sugar and salt from the brine Works its way back to the surface this pellicle can help absorb more Smoky flavor when we put the salmon on the Pit Boss now we can get our Pit Boss pellet grill set up to smoke the salmon load the hopper with your pellets today we'll be using knotty wood almond pellets because we really like the Smoky flavor they put out at low temperatures make sure to store your unused pellets in a good airtight storage container like this one we use from Oklahoma home at Joe's your pellets will stay drier last longer and produce better smoke for you then turn on the Pit Boss let it run through the startup cycle with the lid open and then close the lid and keep the temperature on the smoke setting our goal while smoking the salmon is to raise the temperature of the fish as slowly as possible the faster you cook the faster the muscle fibers contract and you release albumin from the salmon this is that white milky substance you see come out of salmon sometimes when it's cooking it's unappetizing to look at but you also lose a lot of moisture when the albumin escapes so we want to bring the internal temperature of the salmon up as slowly as possible ideally we would start the salmon off cooking at 100 or 120 degrees Fahrenheit and slowly raise the cooking temperature as we go along unfortunately on a Pit Boss the lowest temperature we can achieve is about 180 degrees Fahrenheit on the smoke setting the smoke setting on a Pit Boss is designed to give us the most smoke from our pellets but technically runs anywhere from 180 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit if your temperature starts to drift higher than 200 degrees on the smoke setting simply turn the temperature knob one click to 190 degrees set at this temperature and you'll still get plenty of smoke even though you're not on the smoke set we're going to smoke the salmon on the top rack so we can place a water pan underneath the water pan will add some moisture to the cooking chamber but also act as a barrier to help block some of that direct heat coming from below to take it one step further we're going to start the water pan off with some ice to help keep the cooking temperature around the salmon nice and low lastly for some extra smoke flavor we're going to be using the flip professional Smoke Box from Cameron's we made a video showing you how to set this up as a mini Firebox inside your pellet grill to get some extra smoke flavor from real charcoal and wood chunks so if you haven't watched it yet make sure to check that video out I'll put a link to it down in the description below we're going to light a couple briquettes of charcoal and place a few chunks of apple and Alder Wood on top any fruit wood will pair well with the salmon as well as milder Woods like Alder and Oak now normally my goal is to keep the smoker box as far away from the temperature probe as possible so that I don't affect the temperature reading from the heat of the briquettes however in this case by putting it closer to the temperature Pro we can actually trick The Pit Boss into thinking it's hotter than it is inside the cooking chamber and that may help keep our temperature where the salmon is cooking actually lower than 180 degrees since heat rises we're going to put another water pan with a little bit of ice right over the Firebox here that's going to help blunt some of the uh heat from those charcoal briquettes from flowing into our salmon so just let's look at the smoke but we'll blunt the heat a little bit we're going to brush just a little bit of olive oil on the skin sides of the salmon before we put them on to keep them from sticking so I'll show you how we have it finally set up here we've got our water bath a lot of the ice is melted but it's still pretty cold water we've got our water up here Salmon's in place we've got our Firebox next to the temperature probe as the briquettes burn down and everything I'll move that away and the Pit Boss will slowly come up to its true temperature of 180 degrees you can see I set up a little temperature probe here to see what the actual cooking temperature around the salmon is I'm going to close that to not let our heat out but if you look The Pit Boss is running at 180 degrees or so it thinks but if you come up to what our temperature probe says here we're actually at about 100 and it's a little lower because I just opened the lid but it was running about 125 before now as the water heats up as everything kind of stabilizes this will come up as well but it's a good way to at least get our salmon started at a low temperature so we don't raise it too quickly as we're cooking we're not adding any seasoning at this point yet because we want to leave that pellicle untouched and intact we want to give the salmon as much surface area as possible to absorb as much smoke as possible right in the beginning [Music] at this point our Salmon's been on the smoker for about an hour we've managed to keep our cooking temperature low you can see over here we're still only running about 136 even though the Pit Boss thinks it's running at about 182. I went and put another probe in one of the larger salmon fillets and you can see we're doing a good job of slowly bringing that temperature up they've been on for an hour and our temperature is only at 95 degrees and the thickest part of one of the bigger fillets if you look at the fillets themselves you can see we've got no albumin coming out or anything they're coming up in temperature real slow and we're giving them plenty of time to absorb a lot of smoke flavor before they finish cooking we've only seasoned the salmon with the brine which was salt and sugar and now a little smoke so at this point we're going to add some of our Blues hog Cajun Bayou seasoning this will give it a little extra flavor add some salt spice garlic onion and just a little more barbecue flavor to our our smoked salmon so we're gonna go ahead and sprinkle a little bit on each fillet here and if you've got your uh Nitro gloves with your cloth liners underneath like I do you can touch the salmon don't worry about touching any warm surfaces it's just an easier way to get uh your seasoning on okay the Salmon's been on for about two hours now a couple minutes ago I removed the Firebox it pretty much completely burnt out at that point anyway so it wasn't doing much for us smoke wise so we took that out so now the temperature probe is not being affected by that anymore and I took the other water pan out as well because we didn't need that since we don't have the Smoke Box anymore so now you can see that our temperature for our salmon the cooking temperature is getting up closer to what the true temperature is it's it's going to fall a little bit because I opened the lid but it was running about 170 before we're on the smoke setting and our cooking temperature is crept up to about 200 203 here so what I'm going to do now since the salmon is up to 113 degrees I'm gonna go ahead and turn this up we don't have to worry as much now since the Salmon's starting to raise temperature about cooking as fast as we did before so I'm going to raise this up to about 250 just so we can get things uh moving here and also we're going to be adding a honey glaze next and I want it to be cooking at a little higher temperature so we put that glaze on it thickens up on there and we get some nice color as well so we're just going to continue cooking these at 250 while we get our glaze going sweet glazes go really well on smoked salmon you'll see some recipes that involve Maple or brown sugar we're going to use a combination of Honey water and a little bit of butter to brush on our smoked salmon here at the end so we've been smoking these for about two and a half hours now we're up to about 120 degrees internally so I'm just going to pull these out here now you can skip the glaze if you're watching your sugar in fact you don't even need to technically use any sugar in the brine either you can just use salt and skip the sugar altogether but we're going to use uh this mixture we made we put about a quarter cup honey and a tablespoon of water and a tablespoon of butter and we just warmed it up in a dish here we're going to brush some on the salmon like I said is about 120 degrees internally right now we're aiming for a final internal temperature of 145. so we're going to let these continue to go at 250 degrees until the internal temperature gets to about 140 and then we'll take these off at 140 and they'll continue to rise for maybe another five five degrees or so to get us up to that 145 Mark that we're aiming for so I'm just going to finish brushing uh some glaze on here let these go for a little bit we might brush a second coat on here in about 15-20 minutes or so we'll see how they're looking and go from there we hope you're enjoying this video so far if so please hit the like button and we'd love if you consider subscribing to our channel did you know we have an entire website with even more Pit Boss how-to guides resources and recipes just like this one you can check it out at madbackyard.com we just completely redesigned the website to make everything easier to find we'd love if you'd check it out and let us know what you think down in the comments below we're about three and a half hours now since we first put the salmon on let's take a look at the temperature see our glaze and our rub have browned up a little bit they're looking nice we're gonna go ahead and check one of these big ones here come in right through the side in the thickest part right coming up close to 140 and let that go another degree or two higher and then we're going to pull these off and check the rest of them just make sure they're around the same area again we want to try to get to 145 as our final temperature and they will rise another degree or two after we take them off and they're resting so I did move them around a little bit as we were cooking the left side of my Pit Boss tends to be a little hotter so the ones over on this side we're taking the brunt of the heat especially after I take the water pan out here a few minutes ago so I've been just rotating them a little bit and just letting the glaze caramelize up a little bit here to finish them off for these last few degrees so we're gonna let these run for another four or five minutes check the temperature again and then we'll go ahead and get them off the Pit Boss our fillets took about three and a half hours to smoke but this will vary depending on the thickness of your salmon and how low you're able to get your Pit Boss temperature in the beginning what's important is to use a good instant read thermometer rotate the salmon fillets around as needed if some are cooking faster than others and let the internal temperature tell you when they're finished cooking remove them to another clean wire rack and let them cool for a minute or two before serving all right let's take a taste and see how they came out that is so good it is so tender plenty of smoke flavor tons of flavor from that Cajun Bayou seasoning and that honey glaze just takes it over the top you can see how it's just falling apart here coming right off the skin like that really juicy this is so good I'll put a link to the step-by-step recipe that accompanies this video at madbackyard.com down in the description below I'll put links to all the products we use today as well if you want to check those out and if you have any tips or tricks that you like to use when smoking salmon at home we'd love to hear them so let us know down in the comments and as always thanks for watching foreign

Channel: Mad Backyard

Views: 33,671

Keywords: pit boss, smoked salmon, pit boss smoked salmon, how to make smoked salmon, smoked salmon pellet grill, smoked salmon brine, how to smoke salmon, hot smoked salmon, smoked salmon on a pit boss, how to make smoked salmon on a pellet grill, pit boss pro series, homemade smoked salmon pit boss, pit boss pro series 1150, hot smoked salmon recipe, pellet grill salmon, honey glazed salmon, how to cook hot smoked salmon on a bbq, mad backyard, honey smoked salmon

Id: Z5-ViOMlR2M

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2023