Home curing and smoking your own salmon has to be one of the most rewarding recipes you could possibly try. Even better, it is probably one of the easiest.What I really love about making home smoked slamon myself, is that I can choose how much I cure it. A shorter cure will leave you with a really soft texture, a long cure will draw out more moisture and leave you with a much firmer result.The process of curing is about removing moisture from the meat or fish you are curing in order to kill bacteria. For meats the curing process will take days, weeks or years, however for fish fillets curing times are hours. During the curing process you can play with flavour for your meat or fish by adding ingredients like fennel, black pepper, dill or even vodka and gin. Something you can't do with shop bought smoked salmon.You can do this in two main ways:There are two options for curing:I cure all of my home smoked salmon using the second method.I use the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator (CSG) and wood dust to smoke my salmon. The CSG is a simple device that allows a very slow burn of wood dust, generating smoke, but not emitting much heat at all. Smoking like this in the Egg will not raise the internal temperature more than a few degrees. You're aiming to keep the temperature inside the Egg below 30°C but ideally less than 20°C.The length of time you smoke your food for determines how light or heavy the smoke flavour is. The choice of your wood dust will also affect the flavour with some wood smokes being more subtle than others. A good all rounder is oak, the one I use the most.Add flavours to your cure. A plain cure is just salt and sugar but you can add all sorts to this to give a different flavour (and colour). How about a beetroot and gin cure, or a fennel cure?Choose the wood you smoke the salmon over. Oak is fabulous but try beech or alder or a mixture. This is where you get to experiment and see what you like.Weigh the salt so you have just the right amount to cure the salmon. This method will take longer to extract the moisture but the extended curing time will allow more flavour to develop if you're using seasonings.Time based curing where your fish is completely covered in your cure and you determine the moisture content of your food by how long you leave it. This method allows much faster cures as moisture will be drawn out of the food much more quickly. The down side though is your seasonings will have less time for their flavours to penetrate the food.
Recipe by Nic Williams on January 29, 2016
Prep time: PT20M
Cook time: PT480M
Total time: PT1220M
Big Green Egg, fish