Cold-Smoked Salmon

My son has been fortunate enough to go salmon fishing in New York several times over the past few years.  He goes with his friend and his friend's father and I am totally jealous!  I am not a big fan of cooked salmon, unless it is grilled, but I don't make a special effort to cook and eat it.  However, something that is a very special treat is cold-smoked salmon.  Now THAT is something I make a special effort to prepare and eat! 

Here I am vacuum-packing the fish, and setting 3 of the fillets aside for cold-smoking.

An important note regarding food safety in preparing cold-smoked salmon.  Cold-smoking does not cook the fish, it only adds flavor.  There are a number of parasites that can be found in just about any fish, and just like any fish you also have to use safe food handling with salmon.  Other than the freezing step, during this whole process you want to keep the salmon between 33 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit to inhibit bacteria growth.  If you freeze it, then keep it cold throughout the process, the salmon will be very safe to eat.

The process, in a nutshell
I tend to get wordy, so instead let's look at the steps in this process
1. Freeze the fish
2. Cure it
3. Desalinate
4. Cold-smoke

Freeze the fish
The way that any possible parasites are killed is by freezing the salmon at -10 degrees Fahrenheit (-23 C) for at least 5 days.
First, wrap the salmon and freeze it at -10 degrees F for at least 5 days.  Then thaw it in the refrigerator, and NOT at room temperature.  After it is thawed, pat it dry with a towel or paper towels and place the fish in a casserole dish.

Cure the fish:
2 average-sized salmon fillets will weigh about 1 1/2 pounds, and these are the amounts that I use for that much salmon.  However, this time I made 3 fillets which weighed about 2 1/4 pounds, so I had to increase these amounts accordingly.  Instacure #1 that is mentioned is curing salt that contains 6.25% Sodium Nitrite and is also known as Pink Salt, or Prague Powder, and is used to cure the meat and inhibit microbial growth.

1 teaspoon Instacure #1 curing salt
1/2 cup kosher or canning salt
1 Tablespoon white pepper
1/2 cup white sugar, or brown sugar
This can be increased or decreased depending on how much fish you are preparing.

Mix the ingredients well, the curing salt needs to be well distributed.  Place a thin layer in the bottom of the casserole dish, then lay the fish on top of that.  Distribute the rest of the cure over the top of the fish, and try to cover the fish entirely.


Cover and allow this to sit in the refrigerator for 24 hours, then rinse all of the salt off the fish.

Desalinate the fish
In this next step you will be removing the excess salt.  Place the rinsed fish pieces back in the casserole dish, and fill with cold water.  Place the fish in this water for about 30 minutes in the refrigerator.  Rinse the fish in cold water again then pour the water out and fill the dish with water again.
Place the fish back in the water-filled dish.  I used to desalinate the fish for an hour only, but I found that the final product was way too salty.  After experimenting some, I found that allowing the fish to sit in fresh water overnight in the refrigerator lowers the salinity of the fish much better.
After it sits overnight in the water, pour out the water, and rinse the fish under cold water again.  Then dry it well with paper towels or a towel. 
Place the fish in the casserole dish UN-covered and in the fridge for 24 hours.  This will dry the fish some and form a thin skin that will help in the smoking process.

Here I have drained the fish, dried it with paper towels, then placed it on top of paper towels in the dish, then placed in refrigerator




Cold-Smoking

Cold-smoking is not a cooking process.  The idea is to apply smoke to the food, but not cook it.  You don't want the temperature in the smoker to get above about 80 degrees.  However, I make sure that it stays MUCH lower than that, preferring to get into the safe meat temperature zone of 33 to 40 degrees.  The last batch I smoked was done when the outside temperature was close to 45 degrees.  I also placed a large bowl of ice above and below the fish in the smoker.  A thermometer placed in the smoker showed that it never got above 40 degrees.
The way that I cold-smoke is to use an attachment that I bought for my smoker, a Smoke Daddy smoke generator, available HERE.  This attaches to my smoker as shown here:



The smoker is just used as a chamber to hold the food and smoke, it is not turned on during this process.  The smoke generator gives a lot of smoke but with very little heat.  It is especially ideal for smoking cheese.The smoking time in a lot of articles on the internet are 12 to 24 hours.  I have found that you get a good smoke flavor after an hour or two, I generally smoke it for 2 hours.
If it is not cool enough outside, try to smoke when the sun is low or at night.  Also add a large bowl of ice above and below the fish.  You want to keep the fish cool, even the sun shining on it can heat it to 90-100 or so, and that is too hot and will cook the fish.

I didn't want to waste all the other space in the smoker, so I added some cheese; Gouda, a hot pepper cheese, and a cheese from New Zealand that my wife had bought.




After smoking it for a couple of hours or so I refrigerate some and freeze the rest,  depending on how much I have prepared. 



Serve it alone, or on a bagel with a 'schmear' (cream cheese) or with crackers and cream cheese, or any way you would like.

How To Make Horseradish

I moved into my current home 18 years ago in 1996 and there was already a small horseradish plot in the back yard near the garden area.  It comes back every year, and I have to control it to keep it contained in its area, which is about 8 by 3 feet.  If you are thinking about planting horseradish roots, think ahead and plan an area that will be horseradish until doomsday.

Making prepared horseradish isn't rocket science, just take one simple precaution.  When you grind it, do it outside, on the porch for example.  If you have to do it inside, open some windows and run a fan.  The first year that I made it my son was 5 years old and he looked at me while I was grinding it and said "Dad, your face is all red!"  I looked in the mirror and my face was beet red from the fumes.


Digging

Move the leaves aside, or cut them off at ground level.  Compost them, mulch them, burn them, whatever.  I can't think of another use for them, especially since my chickens won't even eat them, and my chickens will  eat just about anything.  For example, they LOVE chicken!




Start your shovel about 8 to 12 inches from the base of the plant and go as deep as you can go.  Then work your way around the plant and dig a circle around the entire plant.  Before lifting it up out of the ground with your shovel, try to remove as much of the dirt as possible so that you can see where the roots are and how long they are.  I have dug a foot deep and still missed a lot of the root!










Lift it out of the ground, it usually takes quite a bit of leverage from the shovel to lift it out.  You will probably miss some of the root, especially with hard soil like mine, but don't worry, there should be plenty of it anyway.  Here is a section of root after it was pulled out of the ground.




Next you want to remove the excess soil from the root.  I guess you could do this in your sink, but I know my wife would have me sleeping in the shed for a while if I did that.  I enjoy a warm bed inside at night so I rinse it off outside with a hose, on the jet setting if you have a head that is adjustable.




It should look like this when the soil is removed.





Peeling
If the roots are nice and straight, they are much easier to peel.  But large, gnarly pieces as seen above can be broken up into pieces like this that can be more easily worked with a potato peeler.




Scrape the root with a potato peeler until all of the brown outer layer is removed.  It should look about like this after it is peeled.  In this picture you can see a couple of brown spots that I had to cut out with a knife.






Grinding

Next chop it with a good, strong knife into about 1" chunks or smaller.  Try to keep them approximately the same size, this will help to keep the grinding consistent.



Use a blender or food processor, however I highly recommend that you use one with a NON-plastic bowl.  You are basically grinding wood and a plastic food processor or blender will get terribly fogged from scratches.  I learned this the hard way the first year that I made it.
This is approximate, but for every cup of horseradish root, add about 3/4 cup of white vinegar, a teaspoon of salt, and totally optional would be to add 2 teaspoons of sugar.
Grind about 2 cups at a time, adding slowly to get to that point.  Grind it WITH the vinegar added, otherwise it will not grind well, if at all.  You will get a feel for how much vinegar to add as it starts to grind.  Just look for the consistency of store-bought horseradish.  Adding vinegar helps it to grind in the blender, but you don't want to add too much and end up with horseradish soup.
I grind it a lot, probably 3-4 minutes or longer for every 2 of cups of horseradish.




At this point you are basically done, but now to package it.  Horseradish is NOT to be canned, rather it should be frozen, except for a jar that you want to keep in the refrigerator for fresh eating.  The easiest way, and the way I normally do it, is to place it in freezer containers.  I would recommend using half-pint containers unless you eat a lot of horseradish, then you can place it in pints (or larger.)  I don't use large containers because horseradish starts to lose its pungency after a couple of months.   I keep one half-pint in the refrigerator and keep the rest frozen.
This next pic is something that is totally optional.  In fact, this is the first time I have experimented with it.  Jars of food can easily break when frozen, so I am trying to suck the air out of the jars before I freeze them.  This is my FoodSaver V3880 vacuum sealer, which I love.  So far, the half-pint jars have not broken in the freezer, I may or may not be onto something here.  I will follow up with more info if I have any problems.





Here is the final product ready to be frozen, when I had some in half-pint jars and some in pint jars.  However, after this pic was taken I decided not to use any pint jars and split them into 2 half-pint jars each.



As you can see, it is a simple process but it is a lot of peeling and grinding.  If you like horseradish like me, you will LOVE making your own.