Electrician, Volunteer Firefighter, Maple Syrup Manufacturer, Maintenance Guy, Handyman, Meat Smoker, Angler, All Around Cool Dude – Tony from work wears a lot of hats and probably could benefit from his own blog of stuff he does. Every year around this time, he winds up with a surplus of Wild Salmon, which he generously gives away in vacuum packed baggies.

This is wild, not sushi grade, but delicious nevertheless.

Last year I wanted to transform the piece I got into smoked lox, but didn’t have enough time to do adequate research. This year however, I hunkered down and tried to figure out a plan. It seemed easy enough – Salt, Sugar, Time, Rinse, Coldsmoke.

So I gave it a shot! First thing was first, I had to rip out the pin-bones from the fish. I have never done this, so you can imagine it was difficult. Pin bones are the ones you would choke on if you didn’t pull them out. They’re easy to find, you just run your finger along the fillet, and they’ll make themselves known. See them sticking up? Gotta get them out – They sell special little pliers that handle it, but I didn’t have any, so I used my rusty, nasty pliers..  (I cleaned them!)

Was not fun, was not easy. But hey – I didn’t destroy the fillets! (maybe)

The next step was to apply a pile of equal parts sugar and salt to the fillet, and wrap it up in plastic.  I put some dill and pepper in there.. because why not.

Here are the 4 fillet sections, double wrapped in plastic.

Then they went into the fridge, where I put weight on them to help with the removal of the water content of the fish (kind of like tofu) .

I only wanted to do this for 2 days, but my schedule got away from me and I ended up letting them go for 3. I flipped them each night.

Here’s what they looked like still in the wrap  at the end of 3 days.

I took them out of the wrap and rinsed them as good as I could. There was some conflicting information out there as to how long I should have rinsed.. I probably should have rinsed longer (foreshadowing) .

I patted each one dry, and got them ready to go on the smoker.

At this point, they’re apparently lox, so I tried a little bite – !  It wasn’t bad!

Then I got the smoker ready. In this case, I used the vertical offset dynaglo..  which I’m not a huge fan of, but for doing some colder smoke action – it works..  plus I’d rather use that one for the fish than the weber. – I didn’t want a full fire, so I just made an L shape of strategically stacked briquettes. Went with 100% alder wood chips.

The L shape burned a little lower temp than when I stuff the basket full – and the L shape worked kind of like a fuse – but burning real slow.

See you guys in 2 hours! (nice blurry shot jerk)

While they smoked, I made myself a killer sandwich..  I thought I would share it with you –

What’s on it? I’m glad you asked…

Darn tasty!

Ok – flash forward to 2 hours later.. this is what I ended up with.

I’m sorry, but that’s all I have for pictures at this time…  I took a couple sample pieces, and just found them to be really salty. I have a plan though – I am going to make a spread with it – cream cheese and dill – fresh cracked pepper…  The cream cheese will hopefully mellow out the salt flavor, and it could be super yummy!

It might have been just the fillet I tried.. maybe the others are ok..  I will definitely update more as I play with my end results!

jw