Cold Home Smoked Salmon

One of my anniversary gifts to JT was a cold smoker. A Smoke Daddy cold smoker to be exact. Since it attaches to your existing BBQ, we had to figure out how to actually do it without drilling into it! Fortunately, the Weber has several holes and JT was able to come up with a solution.
The main thing about cold smoking is the ‘curing’ process as cold smoking doesn’t cook, it just adds smoke flavour. Since we’d never done a cold smoke before, we wanted to experiment with smaller pieces of salmon (instead of a whole fish). I found this recipe for a dry brine to cure the fish and loved it right away – it reminded me of the Lomi Salmon I made several months ago. We had two 200g pieces of salmon (feeds 4), and kept the ingredients to the dry brine in the same proportions as the recipe. The dry brine draws out all if the moisture from the fish, leaving you with the redest salmon you’ve ever seen! It’s quite beautiful. I actually found this recipe quite salty, so the next one will be another recipe, for sure.

Dry Brine Mix

Salmon in the brine

After about 12 hours in the dry brine

Smoking the salmon with a maple glaze

Thinly sliced smoked salmon plated on Susur Lee's 19 ingredient slaw