Hey everyone, today on Garden Fork we’re going to try and smoke salmon. I’ve never smoke salmon before, I’ve never used a smoker before; one of my best friends, Rand, who now live in Chicago, when he lived in New York he was always smoking food for us and it tasted amazing and then he wanted to give me a smoker when we got our little house up here, up state and I said no, the bugs are deadly today, and he was a little bit out of shape and I was like, oh I don’t want to smoke or any one there before I said it and, but since I’ve started cooking more and making Garden Fork episodes and I’m learning more about barbecue actually, I thought, wow, I could smoke my own food cause we went to Josh Collins, a biscuit barbecue in Brooklyn, and he’s got this smoker in his kitchen and I was like, wow, can that see the light of kind of went off of my head and I thought I’m going to try this. And I thought I’ll try to make a smoker out of like a galvanized metal trash can and I was talking to my neighbors and they said well we have an electric smoker in the garage and we have only used it once so you can have it. So they gave me this smoker here and I’ve been trying to figure out how to work it and not making a mistake so I’ve been on the web, I went to about.com and there’s lots of there. Get out of there, get out of the flower bed, come on, out! Let’s go, no, hey out! You just crushed the oregano. Anyway, we’re going to try this, this is an electric smoker, you can also get gas-powered smokers or you can get charcoal-powered ones, charcoal itself doesn’t put a lot of smoke so you use what you would use an electric or gas smoker, which is wood chips or wood chunks, you can use different kinds of wood. Why don’t you go to the store and buy them some wood chunks. I actually have some apple wood, my neighbor cut down an old apple tree and I said; hey can I have some of the stump pieces from it? So this morning I went up and split off some chunks of it and then I cut them on the saw to make it a little easier, they look like the kind of wood chunks that I see in the pictures. So you know, I don’t know, this is kind of an experiment.
It’s supposed to dump rain here in about four hours so hopefully, I think we can get this done in about four hours. So here we go, okay so before you can smoke fish and we’re going to smoke salmon today, you need to brine it with like a salt water brine, that’s what brine is you take salt. So we have, so I have 2 pounds of salmon that I bought in the store, I’ve got a big sheet pan here to brine it with and I got salt and a pitcher of water here. So it’s one and a quarter cups of salt per quart of water and this one quart of brine per pound of fish, and I have 2 pounds of salmon here. So we’re just going to rinse off the salmon with water and then we’re going to put it in our pan here with the brine and let it sit. Would you like some smoked fish? (Yeah if I would) Rinse off our fish, so this is our salt, you don’t want to use iodized salt. We’re going to put this into our water, garlic, stir it in. You could also put some flavorings in here if you want. I’m not going to but you could put a little white wine in here, stuff like that, you can experiment.
So I’m going to let this brine for about 30 to 45 minutes, about that count said, about 15 minutes per half inch of thickness but this salmon fillets, they kind of change in thickness so I think half hour, forty five minutes it’s enough to (--) some parts outside and we got to look at the smoker and see how the thing works cause I’ve never done this before so that will be an experiment. I think that will be fine now.
Okay so these are our wood chunks, I soaked them in water, it said that for hard woods, this is apple wood which is really hard wood by the way, it said that, you know soaking really doesn’t make that much of a difference, so I’ve been soaking this for about half an hour. One place suggested an hour, I don’t know, we’re going to find out. These are the metal coils, we’re going to put this on top of the metal coils, maybe I made this too small cause this should straddle the coils, I don’t know. Here comes the water bath, this is just a metal bowl that sits in here, oh, that wasn’t good. Pull off the water I’ll turn it off, alright. Now I knew you maintained a temperature of about 200 degrees but this thing doesn’t have a temperature gauge on, it just has this warm, ideal, hot thing. So it’s threatening to rain, we’re supposed to get the big storm so I moved the smoker here over near the garage, I think it’s about a little bit overhang here, and it’s got to cook, they said three, maybe four hours, it has it all, things in the front or we can check it we’ll make sure that it’s still smoking and all that. I don’t know, we’ll see what happens, alright? I guess you can see it but it’s pouring down rain here now, the smoker’s smoking, it still look pretty good, the temperature says it’s kind of hot so you can open up these vents here, aw, that’s hot! You see, see the smoke in there? I open that, the vent to try and lower the temperature; I don’t know if that’ll work, maybe I should call my friend Rand. So the chips are burning and they’re not supposed to burn, they’re just supposed to smoke so I think having the vent open is a bad idea so let’s close that. Oh no, see what happens, it’s an experiment, you know. So with our friend, R2D2 here, the temperature thing went way, way to the hot, super hot side and so I thought if I took the lid off a little bit maybe some reheat would dissipate and then I went to go work on the washing machine. Then when I came back and the R2D2, the thing went way over to the hot and I took the lid off and it then looked very good. So that side super smoked, I just don’t, there’s no water left in the water bath, so I don’t know, did I put too much wood chips in here? I don’t know what I did wrong here but that’s like burnt. Okay, so that’s part 1 of how to smoke, obviously I did it wrong or maybe the machine did it wrong, can I blame the machine? I don’t know, but I’m going to do some more research and I’m going to find out and we’ll see what happens, alright? Check on our website, www.gardenfork.tv, send us an e-mail if you have a solution for this, write us a note, it would be handy, alright? I’ll see you.
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