Smoking Salmon | Alaskan Gold

What's going on guys? Thanks for watching. Today I'm going to smoke some silver salmon or coho. I got about 100 pounds in a brine right now. We usually let it go for four hours and just the brine consists of, it's pretty simple, four parts brown sugar to every one part salt and then I dump some garlic powder in there. We also used a bottle of marinate, a bottle of allegro. So this batch is 100 pounds of fish. I think we ended up using 20 pounds of brown sugar and about five pounds of salt. So you know for 100 pounds of fish that's 25 pounds total of salt and brown sugar and it seems to be doing just fine. So that's been plenty. We also added about a gallon of water. That way we could really saturate everything. It's just easier to work. I turn it about every hour. I'm putting a little bit of charcoal down. That way I can slowly heat up my salmon. I'm not going to be smoking it at first. You know you want your fish to be tacky and set up but since it's nasty outside, it's cold and rainy, that's just going to provide me with a little bit of heat. You know maybe 80 degrees in there, something like that. Get that fish ready to be smoked. I'm not actually smoking it yet. I'm just getting it ready. So I'll show you what it looks like when it's ready to, you know, kick up the fire a little bit. Start adding wood, start adding smoke. It's just to create a little heat in the room so my fish sets up. My fish has been brining for about four and a half hours. Now we're just going to do a little cold water rinse real quick. Just get the excess sugar and salt off of there and we're going to pat it dry and then take it up to the smoker. Lay it out and get going. Just give that a quick rinse. Oh yeah. Yep. It's kind of hard to keep the temps just right. We're running about 120 right now. Green alder wood. It's going to take about 10 hours or so. I like low and slow. Jan likes a whole lot of smoke so perfect weather for that. About 60 degrees outside, real humid, kind of rainy, nasty. So good smoking day. She's, you can look, she's just pumping smoke. Been doing this the whole time. Every now and then I got to kick the temps up to get my coal bed back. Not for very long, maybe five minutes. I'll crack that door open, let it get hot, let those coals build, then choke it back down with green wood and let the smoke roll. It's going to be good. There she is, beautiful day. I'll show the fire. There's not a whole lot to the fire, you know. I cut little stuff. I'm just constantly feeding, you know, basically little pieces of kindling. I want to slowly burn and smolder. I want to keep my coal bed and I'll just add to it. If these guys catch on fire, that's fine. They're small enough. They're not going to heat my box up too much. Yeah, I just, I just split this. It's green. I just keep adding a little bit of greenwood, just keep feeding that fire, keep feeding that fire. Switching my racks, you know, I'll go low to high, high to low, and I'll switch them too. I'll spin them. Especially today, the wind's blowing this way so I noticed the back end of my box was getting done before my front end of the box. So, not only am I going up and down with them, I'm also spinning them 180, trying to get a nice even smoke. Right on. Buck ten. I'll be able to smoke this salmon for eight, ten hours like that. Wow, that smells good. I mean, it's smoky. All right, so I'm heading over to check the fish. Teeny's been over there since five or five this morning helping get, and then he just pulled most of the fish out of the smoker, and I'm about to go help pull the last tray out of the smoker. All right, let's see how this is. I'm going to open up this door and see, see what we got. I love the belly meat because it has the most fat. So, this is the part I really love, the belly meat. It really has a lot of fat. It's really good. I love it. I want to smoke everything. Sorry, my mouth's full. Definitely something I want to try in my lifetime. Smoke some cheese, smoke everything, smoke some jerky, smoke some deer. It's just so good. Let's see what TJ thinks of it, but dude, if you get a chance, build yourself a smoker like this, or you and some friends get together, build a smoker, or get a little chief, and smoke some fish because it's really good. How's it taste? Good. What do you think? I like it. Flavor's good. It's really smoky. Flavor's really good. It's been cold all night and chilly in the morning. It's kind of dried up right now, but you let it sit in a bag for a day or something at room temp, it's gonna, it's gonna moisten up quite a bit. It looks good too. It tastes good. It's good. You want to taste some? Oh, I've been eating it all morning. There's the haul. I think it was 90 pounds yesterday, today it's only about 65. Good haul. It's a nice piece of fish. So we got about 50 pounds. Oh, that's so pretty. There's just so much flavor in each bag. Like when we made that pasta the other night, I shredded it. There's a lot more in there than you think. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like when you go tear it up and use it as a flavor. Yeah. I got the door. Sorry about it.