Girl: He’s teasing you
Guy: Oh, sorry. Hey everyone, today on Garden Fork we’re going to re-visit our attempt to smoke food, after our smoked salmon debacle or whatever, that’s like burnt; one of our viewers, Mike, whose name I can’t pronounce, but quite like, Mike sent us a link to Alton Brown’s website and on his TV show, he smoked salmon in a cardboard box. And also on YouTube, there’s a link to a little video clip of Alton Brown’s show showing how he did this, so I immediately saw that and it’s very low-tech and simple. So I got all the materials together and today we’re going to smoke salmon on a cardboard box, so
Girl: Oh, sounds appetizing
Guy: It’s great, it’s really, really cool. We’re going to make salmon, we’re going to see what happens, I’m not quite sure what will happen but this will be fun, alright?
Girl: It’s got to be better than last time
Guy: It’s got to be better from the last time. Got to do this curing thing which I really didn’t know about until I saw the Alton Brown video clip, and then I found this website by these three guys, it’s called the threemen.com. So what you do is you brine the salmon for probably, so probably about an hour. And then you cure it, so what you do is you basically put on a rack, the rack that you’re going to put in the cardboard smoker, put it in area where the flies aren’t going to get to that part, we’re going to use the screen and port here, and point a fan at it and you basically got to air dry, it’s almost like aging meat maybe, I don’t know; then you put his fan on there and then after a while with that it creates with color pale of gold, just kind of like dry crusty coating. And then we’ll put it in the cardboard smoker today. So this is going to be fun. So we have our salmon right here and what I’m going to do is I’m going to cut the salmon to like 2 or 3 inch strips, because when I buy it in the store, you know, we use it in a salad or sandwich, something that comes in the shrink wrap kind of strips like this one and I think that the easier cause you can freeze it, and also that means that the brining time is less and I think the smoking time will be less as well. So this we cut, so I’m going to cut this into our 2 or 3 inch pieces, you should use a really sharp knife for this; a sharp knife is essential for this. So the brine I’m going to make, I kind of do in a mass shop on the web, I would suggest threemen.com and they have a neat recipe. And I also got a bunch of e-mails from people; Tim sent me his recipe, Bryce sent me also stuff of what I should do with my smoker, Adam sent me bunch of information and Mike, whose name I cannot pronounce, like mine, set me the links to the cardboard smokers, so thanks for all that. So we’re going to make our brine with the recipe I’m going to kind of wing here, and we’re going to let this soak for about an hour, an hour and a half, put it in the fridge by the way, let’s put it in a pan, put it in the fridge. Okay, so what we’ve got here is we’ve got 2 quarts of warm water, I’m going to put in a cup of brown sugar, I will put in a half a cup of kosher salt, you can use regular salt or just can be iodized salt, I’m going to put a tablespoon of cinnamon in. Some other recipes call for all-spice and nutmeg; I didn’t have any so we’re going to use cinnamon. They also called for nutmeg powder, I didn’t have any; garlic powder, I don’t have any garlic powder so I’m going to use just some crushed garlic, couple of golden lemon juice.
This is our brined salmon here. So basically I put it in the fridge for about an hour and a half here and I also, I put it skin side up so that the brine would get in to the meat of the fish.
So this has been soaking for about hour and a half, and now we’re going to cure it. So it has a pallor coats coat on it, alright?
Girl: What?
Guy: Pallor coat, some kind of a coating. And I’m not going to rinse this, there’s a debate as to whether you should rinse
Girl: the brine off
Guy: The brine of or not, you know, and I’m not going to do that, so we’re just going to take this out, I’m swishing this around a little bit, put all of the good stuff on them. I’m just going to do some cracked pepper on here, now I’m going to do our curing. Now we decided to do the curing on our side porch cause it has a lot of air circulation and it has greens, cause you don’t want bugs getting on your food.
Girl: Oh, is this the anise for the, your bit cooking?
Guy: This is a very good use for your yogurt containers so; I save all the yogurt containers thinking of, think of a use for them.
Girl: I was way thinking about that
Guy: I think I have a lot of them
Girl: Hello, okay!
Guy: Okay so now, these are, you know these are a lot of air circulation through here but what I read was they suggest putting a fan on them. So we have a little fan right here.
This is our cardboard box, it’s a moving box, the trick is that you unpainted on the inside, this is basically a brand new box, you know what, I don’t know why some are painting inside of the box, but we’re going to seal the bottom of it. For the urn I guess you got to tape this with a piece of tape
Girl: And isn’t that tape is not flammable?
Guy: It’s less flammable in the cardboard so
Girl: Get your 911 ready, are you worried honey?
Guy: Okay, so to do this you need dollar rags
Girl: Where do you toss them?
Guy: At the hardware store. And you got to put them through so that your oven grate will sit right up; does this for your smoke chamber; that’s okay. And this is an electric skillet
Girl: Where’d you get that?
Guy: Ace, Ace hardware where I got this from.
There you go, so you could reach in and adjust your dial, and you could also add more chips in, cast iron pan, just goes on top of the, top of the thing. I’ve been soaking my chips now in the Alton Brown that saw, he used sawdust oak, you know hardwood sawdust and he said go to a cow den maker and get sawdust.
Girl: We couldn’t have the barn
Guy: And you know I like Alton Brown but I don’t think most people are going to be able to cow den maker and get hardwood sawdust, I’m going to need a lot. Because a lot, most cow den makers also use plywood and melamine and MDF and they’d all go in the same vacuum system, so and they said don’t use wood chips but I’m going to use apple chips and I’ve been soaking them all day long in water cause I got a bunch of e-mails form people that I wasn’t soaking the wood long enough. So I’m going to fill this
Girl: But where did those apple chips wood come from? You bought them or you cut them?
Guy: No I bought this at the hardware stores
Girl: At the hardware store
Guy: Yeah
Girl: And they came pre-chipped?
Guy: Yeah, after looking at them I realized, you know we have a little cheaper, you know, gas part chip where I could just shove them, apple sticks than other cheaper
Girl: Chips are on there too
Guy: I can make that here, 3 dollars a bag. Alright so I’m going to put some of these in here; now the trick here is you don’t need a ton of smoke, you just need some smoke and some heat.
Girl: You know the trick?
Guy: Yeah, like I know the trick. Alright so I’m going to put 2 head poles in there
Girl: It just sticks to the right
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