This week in the gallery, I want to talk to you a little bit about smoking fish. Now, lots of times, people just get intimidated about smoking fish. I tell you, it’s one of the easiest things to do. And today about the freelance, we’re catching Bonita. Bonita is one of the best fish to smoke. Now, it’s related to the tuna family and it smokes up really well. These are some of the Bonita that we’re catching in today’s episode. This is what it looks like on the inside. And we have the skin still on it.
The first thing we’re going to do is make our brine. Now the whole key to smoking is having a system. And what we’re using is the Bradley smoker system. They have their own brine, really easy to use. You just mix it with water, so I already have a bowl here with 10 cups of water and what we’re going to do is add a quarter and one full cup of the brine.
And we just put this right inside the water. Yes we have a quarter cup already inside the container with the water in. Now we need a full cup. Put a full cup in there. Now we have our brine and water. That’s all we have in this solution right now and just kind of mix this up really well, so they’re all diluted in there. And at this point, all we have to do now is add the fish. So we’re just going to grab a piece of fish. This is our Bonita. We’re going to leave the skin on there. And a lot of people like to smoke without skin. It doesn’t bother me having the skin on there. So I’ve got the fish in here.
Now that we have our fish in the brine, all you want to do is put this in the refrigerator, and you want to have it there at least for a few hours. But it wouldn’t hurt anything if you left the fish in the brine overnight.
And now the critical part of the whole Bradley smoker system is the briskets and this is what they look like and they come in different flavors. We have hickory, we have maple there. And the one that we’re using right now is the maple. And all you do is you just takes this, open them out of the package, and you drop them right into the smoker. There’s a little feeder there, and it loads it, and takes it right into the smoker. And as they burn off, they drop into the bowl in the water.
We’ve got all the briskets. Everything is loaded. The only thing left to do now is drop in our fish. Remember, at home, you’d want to have that fish sit in the brine at least for a few hours. Overnight would be safe. It would be fine.
The last thing is as you pull the fish to put in the smoker, make sure there are no big chunks of brine on it. Here it is nice and clean. So we’re going to go ahead and slide it on one of the trays, and drop our fish right inside there. And I’m going to put the skin on the bottom, onto the tray just like that. Just lay it all the way across. We’re just going to close that.
Again, we’ve preheated our Bradley smoker so it’s all ready to go. And that’s all there is to it. You know a lot of people get intimidated on smoking fish or any sort of meats. In fact, it’s a very simple process to do. You use the whole Bradley smoker system. You get the brine, the briskets, the smoker, you’re all good to go.
Well, all we got to do now is wait two hours. An hour and a half to two hours is recommended cooking time. We’ll wait the full two hours. And then we’ll show you what it looks like.
Ok we’ve had the Bonita inside the smoker for two hours now so it’s all ready. Let’s open it up and take a look at it. Oh, look at that. It looks awesome. There’s our Bonita, all smoked up. And all we’re going to do here is just take a little bite. Grab a piece, oh look at the color of that fish. That’s awesome.
A very simple process, you use the brine, drop the fish in here and you’re good to go. This is a great way to smoke up some fish nice and easy. Well let’s get back on the water and show you more exciting fishing action aboard the freelance right here on Sport Fishing.
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