As the person that gets all the calls about how to cook this or that,  I decided it was time to smoke some salmon. I’m not a big fish person, so this was my first time to ever cook any. This was going to kill two birds with one stone, because I was being bugged by a co-worker whose birthday it was, that really wanted some smoked salmon for the big day. So off to the grocery store I went.

I used the recipe in our Still Smokin’ Cookbook, “Smoked Salmon”, from page 91. It called for 1 salmon filet (1 to 3 pounds), so I bought 2 filets and the seasonings to get it going. I washed it and then seasoned the filets with the kosher salt, brown sugar, white sugar, white pepper, black pepper and cayenne pepper, just like the recipe told me to, then wrapped it up in plastic wrap and foil for 24 hours and refrigerated it.

Then the next day I took them out of the wrapping and rinsed for 20 minutes. Since that seemed like a long time, we had the brilliant idea of using a rubber band to hold the sprayer on and pointed down on the fish, so that it would be evenly rinsed while we worked. That was great until I went to wash my hands later and ended up soaked from the sprayer I forgot to remove the rubber band from!  When we were done rinsing, I patted the filets dry and then to the smoker we swam.

I put them on a seafood grill, but I would recommend spraying it with a non-stick spray first, as I learned that the scales will stick to the grill. And then set the temperature to 150ºF and let it cook for 5 hours, at least those were the instructions. But I decided that it was going to take forever, and I have very impatient people that work with me, so I went back out and cranked up the temperature to 200ºF so that it would cook faster, and let it go for a total of about 4 hours and then took it out.

It looked really pretty. It had a nice peachy pink color. Since I’m not the big fish connoisseur, I had Cayley the food critic try it first [Cayley’s note: I think she wanted to make sure it was safe to eat first!]. Nice, her first bite and she said that it was really salty [Cayley’s note: woo-wee, was it ever!]. So mental note: you need to rinse the salmon longer. As I walked in the kitchen, she was in there tasting it again, I think that she had at least 3 bites and said that it was not as salty the further you get into the meat. Good excuse! It seems like the salt was all sitting on the top, but the inside of the fish was not so bad. So once again a somewhat successful cook! Good Smokin’ to all.

Heather