Kokanee - Tasty, but a lot of work per pound

[pmmpete]

December 24 I caught 80 Kokanee Salmon, and smoked them in three batches that evening and the 25th.  They were small, so I had to do a lot of processing per pound of fish, but they are quite tasty.

The lake in which I caught the Kokanee has an overpopulation problem, so there is no limit on the number of Kokanee you can catch or possess.  Four of us caught a total of 214 Kokanee.  But due to overpopulation, the Kokanee average only about 8 inches long.

I prefer to get rid of the bones while preparing the Kokanee for smoking, rather than trying to pick them out after the fish have been smoked.  So I scale each fish, cut the fillets off the backbone, and remove the ribs and fins.  It's a lot of work for each little fish.  Here is a batch of fillets soaking in a brine which includes pineapple and orange:



And here is a batch in a modified Kummok brine:



Here is one of the batches laid out on racks in front of a fan, developing a pedicule:



And here are a couple batches in the vacuum packaging:



It's a lot of work per pound of fish, but they smoke up nicely because they're a consistent thickness.  And when you get an urge for some smoked fish, all you need to do is pull the skin off a fillet, slap it on a cracker, and chow down.

[Game-smoker]

Those look awesome !!!! How long are you smoking those since they are so tiny ?

[pmmpete]

About 3.5 hours.  Half an hour at 100 with no smoke, an hour at 120 with smoke, an hour at 140 with smoke, and then an hour or more at 160 until they're done.  The fillets are too thin to insert a thermometer probe, so I can't monitor the internal temperature, but I figure it shouldn't lag too much behind the air temperature.

[tsquared]

pmmpete--You're making my mouth water, man!! I have the best memories of smoked kokanee as a kid, although they were somewhat bigger than those. If you have a great abundance, maybe you should fillet, smoke and then pressure can in small mason jars. That's how I do pinks as the bones are too fiddly for me to remove. A tiny bit of vinegar dissolves the bones when canned--it's great!
T2

[pmmpete]

tsquared, I have a friend who smokes and cans Kokanees, but I like smoked Kokanees better than canned Kokanees, so I haven't tried canning them.  However, I like pickled fish, and am planning to pickle some of my next catch of Kokanees.  The pickling process should make the bones disappear, and all I'd need to do is gut and scale the little bitty fish, which would be a lot less work than the filleting I do to prepare them for smoking.  I could also cut the Kokanees into bite sized pieces across the backbone before pickling them, as is often done with pickled herring, which wouldn't be much additional work.

Northern Pikeminnows (still referred to by non politically correct fishermen as squawfish) taste good when cooked, but they have so many bones that it isn't worth trying to cook and eat them.  As an experiment I filleted and pickled a bunch of big pikeminnows.  They tasted great, and the irritating little bones completely disappeared.  So the bones in little Kokanees should also disappear when the fish are pickled.

[OldHoss]

Wow....impressive indeedy.