Cold smoked salmon, the third

[Jonas-Switzerland]

So...

Yeah my second batch of lox came out pretty good. My in-laws loved it. Wife ordered more salmon for lox.

Now this time, I wanna try out Mark Foreman's brine (recipe in the linked thread). The original recipe called for 80g of salt per liter. My previous brine had more salt than sugar, while Marks' recipe is the opposite. I chickened out, and increased the amount of salt to 100g per liter. Need to build up the courage first.

Also, I just kept it to salt and sugar. Like I said before, baby steps

Already like the workflow a lot more. 8-12h brine time is much easier to organize. I could not find my really big pot. So, two big pots were necessary for my 4 salmon sides.

Here would be a picture, but...

You can see how much I hate the camera app on my new phone. (all modern smartphones capture a short video and stitch together an image in post. But this one always takes longer than you'd think. So the image you see being added in the app's animation isn't the one you get.) This is what I got

Back on topic. It looked great. It was less firm than my 20% salinity brine. Its now sitting covered in my fridge. I'll uncover it for 4h before the first smoke session. My youngest had other plans for me this evening. He had a rough day, and needs to sleep on my belly.



Gonna smoke the salmon tomorrow evening.

So long, and good night.

 

[Jonas-Switzerland]

Yesterday evening was good.

Found a good bottle of champagne for the occasion. I forgot I had some fancy stuff.



Wrote my letter of resignation, and then turned my attention back to the WSM. By the time I got outside I had a proper french buzz.

My wife can't drink for the moment, so it was all for me.

Last smoke session my tube got snuffed out. In my genius state, I decided to add some beech chips in between. And since the tube got chip, then I should get some chips as well.



Good times.

The salmon looked fantastic. It got 4 hours uncovered in the fridge, and was a lot softer than my second batch. The 20% salinity brine had it firm up a lot. This one left it softer.



Oh, I forgot. I accidentally did an experiment. Since I could only fit 3 pieces of salmon in one brine pot, I had to brine one seperately. So, the other pieces were swimming in about 2.5-3l of brine, while the toothpick piece sat in 2l of brine on its own. My theory is if I'd brine the salmon in a plastic bag with just a few ml's of brine to cover it, then there should be too little salt in the environment to achieve the same salt levels as a big pot of brine. This experiment is just to see if I got a different level of saltiness.

It smoked through the night. We have such a cool and gloomy weather I can air out the fish through the morning. Pictures will follow.

 

[Mike Shook]

With cold smoke, are you putting the fish on planks? Or straight on the grates?