The Salmon are running

[Phone Guy]

Kummok,

I was able to get out on the Sac. last Thursday. We tried Flatfish wrapped with sardine, others were catching them but we didn't have a lot of luck until we switched to roe. We came home with 3 nice kings. The big one was about 20 lbs. They were all nice fish. We were at the "Barge hole" if you know where that is. Below Anderson. Well we hade some fillets on Friday for dinner and I am going to be trying your recipe for smoking some of what I have left. I have a question for you.
When you say cut in strips of 1/2" and you leave the skin on, is the skin on the 1/2" side? Do I cut across the width or length wise?
I have fillets with the skin on that are maybe 7 lbs.

[Kummok]

Nice catch PG! I actually don't recall ever fishing the Sac, but the Barge hole sounds familiar. Most of my fishing was north, on the Klamath, for steelhead.....which we didn't eat. That last part is probably why I got outta doing that kinda fishing!

Since writing that recipe, I've switched to skinning the meat before brining. I've come to appreciate more surface area being smoked per pound, so removing skin and slicing meat thinner gives me that "extended surface area" advantage I'm after. The caveat is; the thinner the meat, the lesser the time to smoke. I'm down to about 4-5 hours now, with thinner skinless slices. I do keep a few thicker slices for the back of the smoker, directly above the heat tube.....otherwise I end up with some pretty crispy critters back there.

As far as the grain, most of my cuts are cross-grain, but the main objective is uniform sizes of meat so it really depends on the piece of meat I'm cutting......mostly tails and collars. When I used fillets for smoking, it's pretty easy to get uniform size cuts, all cross-grain.

In your case, I'd take skins off, and cut from the top of the fillet to the bottom (belly), in 3/8 to 1/2 inch slices. When you get the bigger Kings, you want to actually seperate the upper/thicker and lower/thinner pieces of meat by cutting along the backbone line and slice the upper and lower (belly) pieces separately into the same size slices, 3/8 to 1/2 inch......but that's ONLY if you like the fish smoked the same as mine. Remember that this is the way I do KINGS. Many folks, including me, like bigger/thicker slices of meat, especially when smoking the lower oil content salmon like Silvers, Pinks, Atlantic farm (Soylent Green![}:)][:D]).

BTW, how'd you prepare the fillets for dinner?



35 years of extinguishing smoking stuff and now I'm wondering WHY!
Kummok @ Homer, AK USA

[Phone Guy]

Thanks for the quick reply!

The fillets were fresh and I had the In-Laws for the weekend so I simply saute'd in a little butter with salt and pepper. I wanted to get that fresh salmon flavor and they were great.

I'm going to try some sqaw candy also.

[Kummok]

These days, I cut all my Kings into 1-1/4" steaks for uniform (aka "consistent"!) grilling results, leaving the tails and collars for later smoking. I'm addicted to the Reveo marinate process with Yoshida's Gourmet Sauce for 10 minutes, then flame grill for no more than 3 minutes per side, sometimes throwing an Alder puck on the grill burner. My wife prefers the Chef Paul salmon spice instead of the Yoshida's, but grilled the same way.

Let me know how your squaw candy turns out.....[:p]

35 years of extinguishing smoking stuff and now I'm wondering WHY!
Kummok @ Homer, AK USA

[tsquared]

Sounds like a fun day on the river, Phone Guy!
T2