Home-Smoked Salmon

I love smoked salmon! For years I toyed with the idea of smoking salmon myself so I could control the sodium level, quality, and flavor. And last year while visiting a friend, I had the opportunity to try making and eating fresh home-smoked fish --- what a WOW experience! I arrived home, ready to quit toying with the idea and try my hand at it.


My friend used a specialized electric smoker, but I decided to start off more simply... using my outdoor gas grill. I searched the Internet for recipes and techniques, and I experimented with them whenever local salmon went on sale. What follows is my current recipe. Feel free to change it up so it tastes the way you like best!

It takes about 5-7 hrs total time to make, although most of that time is spent waiting, not working. The breakdown of time is as follows:

       ½ hr preparation + ½ hr brining + 2 hrs drying + 2-4 hrs smoking

Anne's Home-Smoked Salmon

• Brine (use about 1 cup per side of salmon):
  
  • 1 cup of lukewarm water
  • 2T kosher salt
  • 1/3 cup honey
  • 1/3 cup brown sugar
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1+ teaspoon minced garlic (fresh tastes best, but dried is ok)
• Wild salmon fillets.
  
• 2-3 handfuls of wood chips - alder, mesquite, etc. If you use the chips for BBQing that are available at the grocery or other stores, they'll be fine. If you get wood at the lumberyard, make sure it's untreated.

Carefully bone the salmon. First, wash a pair of needle-nose pliers. Then run your finger across the salmon side, feeling for the pin bones. When you find one, use the pliers to grasp it and pull it out. The bones are in there at an angle, so be sure to pull at the same angle, or else you'll rip the flesh.


Then you have a choice --- to leave the salmon fillets whole, or to cut them up. When serving, I like to present a whole side of salmon, but for brining and smoking and freezing, it's easier to work with smaller pieces. So I'll often cut a side of salmon up for smoking and then reassemble it for serving (you can see an example of this in the first picture).

Next, simmer the bay leaf (or leaves) in a little additional water while making the brine. To make the brine, add the various ingredients to the lukewarm water and stir until dissolved. Then add in the bay water & leaves.


Place the salmon in the brine in a glass or plastic container. Since the salmon tends to float, if it all fits in one layer, I place it skin side up so the flesh will be in contact with the brine. Otherwise, if you need to layer the salmon, place the fillets face-to-face and back-to-back to help keep scales off the the flesh. If necessary, place a small plate on the salmon to weigh it down. Allow the salmon to brine for 30 minutes. If you prefer your salmon saltier, brine it longer.



After it's brined to your satisfaction, remove the salmon from the brine, rinse well (but don't scrub the fish!), and pat dry. Allow the salmon to dry on racks (I use cookie racks) over cookie sheets (to catch any drips) in a cool place in the open air for at least 2 hrs (a basement is a great place to do this). No guarantees, but I read that, because the fish has been brined, it won't spoil. As the fish dries, its surface gets kind of tacky --- perfect for capturing little smoke particles!


Soak the wood chips in water for the last half hour of the fish's drying time. About 5 minutes before the drying time is done, place a handful of wet wood chips in a smoking box¹, and place the box directly on one burner on one side of the grill, under the grate. Turn on only that one burner. Set it to medium/high for about 5 minutes to get some smoke going and then adjust it back to medium or low. Adjust the setting as needed to achieve a low temperature (200 – 300 degrees).


Oil a cooling rack and place the salmon on it, skin-side down. If you like pepper, sprinkle some cracked black pepper on the fish. Place the rack on the cool side of the grill and close the lid. If you have more racks of salmon than will fit on the grill surface, I've found it possible to stack them, using other grill accessories like a warming or shish-kabob rack.


Check on the salmon every 15-30 minutes or so and add more wet chips to the smoking box as needed (i.e. if it doesn’t seem very smoky). After an hour, start testing the salmon for doneness and take it off the grill when it reaches 165 degrees. The length of time it takes will depend on the grill temperature.


Serve immediately or cool to room temperature, wrap tightly and then either refrigerate for up to 3 days or freeze in an airtight bag.

Enjoy!

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¹ A smoking box is a small metal box with holes in it and a removable lid. I found one in the BBQ section of the hardware store for a few dollars. You can also use an aluminum foil pouch with holes punched in it, instead. Just put the wet wood chips in the box or pouch, place it on or near the burner and, voilà... smoke!

Eating With Our Eyes

When we think about eating, we usually think about the taste of food in our mouths, but we also eat with our eyes! A beautiful plate of food is an expression of love and consciousness -- one that says that not only did extra loving care go into the cooking, but someone cared about YOU enough to make your plate look tempting.


Making food delicious to the eye is also part of making it delicious to the palate. When food looks fresh and interesting, it sets our expectations that it will taste that way, too. And expectations help determine what we experience. For an individual trying to eat less, it can help make up for eating less quantity. And for someone with an impaired appetite, it can be the difference between being able to eat at all or not.

A friend's mother, who is a well-known retired nutritionist and cooking teacher in Japan, always said that a meal should include 5 colors. In that way you could make sure to get a good balance of healthy food components. So the beauty of delicious-looking food is not just skin-deep!

I'm not an expert at food presentation, but I care about it when I cook and serve, and I expect you do, too. I've spent some serious time thinking about it recently, trying to organize my thoughts and reinforce my commitment to good presentation, and here's what I've come up with. To me, the key principles center around freshness, variety, and composition.

Freshness
Food looks best when it appears to have just been picked or prepared. An obvious example is lettuce -- it looks great when it's crisp; it looks sad when it's limp. Similarly, veggies look more appetizing when they're closer to their fresh-picked colors. I may love the taste of green beans cooked until they're a muddy green with onion & a bit of bacon, but I will admit that they're not a treat to look at, even to these Indiana eyes. Beans steamed just until they're tender, however, are delicious to both the eye and the palate.

Fresh-picked juicy tomatoes
One of the big keys to a fresh look is moisture or juiciness. Think about two ripe tomatoes -- one glistens as if just picked with dew still on it, the other looks dry and its skin is a little loose. Which looks more delicious? If you cook meat or fish, the same principle applies -- it's most appetizing when it looks juicy. Maybe liquids hit more taste buds and throw off more aroma molecules for our noses, so our experience is that flavor is intensified? Whatever it is, I think, to our brains: Juicy = Fresh = Delicious!

Variety
When it's not all the same color, or the same texture, or even the same shape, food looks more interesting. A plate of whole wheat pasta with garlic, onion and parmesan might be good, but it's all pretty much the same color. Consider adding some parsley or colorful lightly sauteed veggies to give it some variety.

Pasta primavera topped with toasted almonds.
Another option is to use a colorful serving dish to set off bland-colored food.


Shape and texture can also add interest. Several years ago I had a wonderful dish of asparagus and snap-peas with fresh dill at The Screen Door restaurant in Portland. Rather than slicing everything into little cylinders, the chef had elected to slice the asparagus and snap-peas on the bias. I don't know if you've ever seen snap peas cut that way, but they're very intriguing looking -- you see the whole structure of the pod and peas in it. To add even more visual interest, the chef had then added some pea shoots, with their leaves and little curving tendrils. It was an amazing dish -- as delicious to look at as to eat!

Snap peas cut on an extreme bias.
Sometimes garnishes can be used to add shape and texture. My preference is to only use them when they add to both the taste and the look of a dish; it hurts me to see, for example, beds of lettuce and parsley sprigs just thrown away. At a tiny Japanese restaurant in San Francisco's Japantown, we were served smoked salmon nigiri sushi with a tiny thinly-sliced wedge of lemon topping each piece. It was very beautiful - a small fan of yellow atop the orange salmon on the white rice cake. But moreover, the flavor of lemon with the salmon was exquisite. That remains, in my mind, the example of a perfect garnish.

Composition
This is where we really enter the realm of art. The plate or the table or a serving dish is our canvas. For our design elements, there is the food itself, along with any garnishes or sauces and the serving dishes or plates.

If you're a visual artist, then you're way ahead of the game when it comes to composition. Fortunately, for the rest of us, there are various rules of thumb that can be learned and applied; techniques that are typically used in 2-dimensional art but, I think, can apply as well to food presentation.

First there are the design principles that don't tell you how to design, so much as what to shoot for in your composition. Principles like 1) creating a center of interest, 2) striving for harmony and complementary effects, 3) aiming for a unified whole, but with some interesting variation, and 4) using contrasting visuals.

Then there are some principles that can provide real guidance in achieving a pleasing composition. Here are a few that I find helpful:

The rule of thirds. In visual art, the rule of thirds says if you divide your canvas into 9 equal segments via 2 horizontal and 2 vertical lines, then placing the important elements of the picture along those lines or at their intersections will add balance and interest. So, when I plate food, I often consider the plate my canvas and try to arrange the food on it accordingly -- not at the center, not at the very edges, but about a third of the way over and/or across.

A plating according to the rule of thirds
Balance. Applying the rule of thirds can put the main subject off-center, creating an interesting asymmetry, but also leaving an empty space on the other side. For balance, include one or more offsetting design elements in that space... another small amount of food, or a garnish, or even some painted strokes of sauce.

The rule of odds. For some reason, human brains like to see an odd number of subjects in an image. So if I'm preparing a plate of food, I'll usually try to arrange it to contain 3 groupings of food, for example a main dish and 2 sides.

Simplification. You've heard the mnemonic KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), right? Well, it applies to food presentation, too. Too much clutter on a plate detracts visually, drawing the eye away from the primary focus. So, use large plates, don't try to crowd too much on each one, and clean off smears and smudges of food before serving.


Bon Appetit!