Homemade Sausage Making

Here is one of my favorite smoked Salmon recipes. I hope everyone else likes it as much as I do.

4 pounds salmon fillets
3 quarts cold water
1 quart soy sauce
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup pickling salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup honey
3 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 Tbs onion powder
2 Tbs Penzey`s Northwoods seasoning
2 tsp white pepper

Add the sugar to one quart of the water. Heat the mixture until sugar has completely dissolved, stirring often. Remove from the heat and add honey, stirring until dissolved. Add the garlic, onion powder, pepper and Northwoods and cover the pan. Let it steep for 5 minutes. Add the spice-syrup mixture, the salt, and the soy sauce to the remaining two quarts of water and stir until the salt is dissolved. Refrigerate the brine overnight to 40 degrees
Next prep the salmon. Pull the pin bones out if they are present. Cut the salmon into 2-inch wide pieces and add the fish to the brine. Brining will take from six to twelve hours, depending on the thickness of the salmon. Salmon over one inch thick should brine for eight to twelve hours. For thinner salmon, six to eight hours is fine.

I use the hot smoking method right around 200 degrees till the salmon hits 152 degree internal temp

Hey Scott, this one looks like a winner. And my wife just brought home a salmon too! (heh,heh,heh...) She was going to poach it. Won't she be surprised to find it in the smoker. She probably won't speak to me for a week! I've got to get a quick order to Penzeys. Hey I bet our buddy Salmonclubber even tries this one.

Best Wishes,
Chuckwagon

Hi Scott and CW,
Smoked salmon is my most favourite food, hot smoked or cold smoked no difference to me.
What really p---s me off is that I cannot buy the Penzey's Northwoods seasoning.
Trying to import it is virtually impossible with our

Damn computers, the thing just took off uncontrollably and posted half my message.
Quarantine here got us by the short and curlies, too many regulations and paperwork.
Any idea what is the make-up of it.
Best Regards,
Jan.

crustyo44 wrote: Any idea what is the make-up of it.
Best Regards,
Jan.

My Northwoods Fire jar says "coarse flake salt, chipotle pepper, Hungarian paprika, Tellicherry black pepper, garlic, rosemary, thyme, and cayenne."
...also sez "...has the same great flavor as the regular Northwoods Seasoning, but with the added kick of smoky chipotle and cayenne red peppers..." so you could leave those out and have what you need.

Good luck on the proportions. One serving size is 1/4 tsp (0.8 gm), and it lists sodium at 74 mg for what it's worth.

el Ducko,
Thank you for the ingredient list. I will certainly try this recipe out early next month on our Tasmanian salmon as well as taylor and mullet.
Regards,
Jan.

crustyo44 wrote:...the ingredient list...

Jan,
I ran a spreadsheet on it to check weights. The Northwoods Fire list works out to about 23.5% salt if you include the atomic weight of chloride ion with the 74 mg of sodium per serving. Assuming you have everything else at 0.1 grams (.8 gram/serving), except the chipotle and cayenne (at 0.05/serving), things add up pretty well. Therefore, I'd shoot for 25% salt plus equal weights of the other ingredients. (I left the black pepper alone.)

Wish I could drop by and try your fish. (...searching for salivating smiley...) It's a bit of a swim, however, even for a duck.

Jan, you could delete the Northwoods and the recipe is still good. Just make sure you get a nice pellicle before you put it in the smoker. I have used a fan to speed up the drying process.

One product I am really looking forward to adding to the repertoire is smoked salmon belly snack sticks. Like almost all things in food, they have already existed prior to my mind but I will be sure to submit the recipe and more importantly the method once I have it fine tuned.

Essentially it is just belly trim, the pieces some chefs throw away in restaurants because they have no use. They are cured, dehydrated to an extent and smoked. What a great way to utilize trim!

Nibble food is much sought after for walking around food. A fine cheap date in Baltimore is a half pound of steamed shrimp and a couple of beers down at the inner harbor.

that is good recipe i like to eat it i will make a try to make this recipe if i could i will tell to you... i have also a recipe a a goos one if you like to read it id,,,
http://fishcooking.about.com/od/smokebr ... ngfish.htm
you can visit this

For about five years, I've been using this recipe to cure salmon. With one exception: I add a capful of gin per pound of salmon to the dry ingredients and mix that up before putting it on the fish. Don't forget to obsessively rinse off all the salt after curing.

You can eat it as is, or cold-smoke it for 3 or 4 hours. I prefer to cold-smoke it, but of course "cold" is a relative term in Tampa. In the winter here, I'm lucky if the temperature in my grill stays below 90F when smoking the fish. In the summer I don't even try.

After smoking I store it in the fridge over nght before eating.

Anyway, it tastes great and no-one's died yet.

Great recipe. I've used vodka before (Emeril Legasse recommendation), and felt like it didn't add much in the way of taste. However, I bet the gin (juniper) version tastes really good. I'll try it right away.

Wanna have fun? The "Cooking for Engineers" site that laripu references has a classic debate on what brand of canned soup to use for green bean casserole. As a life-long, can't-see-forest-for-trees engineer, I got a kick out of that thread. ...shows you how anal someone can get while entirely missing the point. ...reminds me of my mother's cooking- - never use fresh when canned will do. About twenty years ago, she stocked an emergency supply of food for when the New Madrid Fault was gonna open any minute. Had about two years worth of canned tomatoes stashed around the house. We kept finding 'em and throwing 'em away for years. Sorry, all you Italians out there- - to this day, I can't stomach a tomato sauce.

I make gravlax quite often but have never tried the gin . And yes you could cold smoke and I too like it that way, but then you can't call it gravlax. So far this year I've prepared sockeye, coho and even a couple of pinks (turned out very good out of the smoker). When I get back home in a couple of weeks my favorite chinooks should be back in the rivers.

Oh man, I envy you people in the NW this time of year! Fresh salmon is so hard to come by, and when one can get it, its very expensive.