Smoked Salmon, Round one

So how did the smoked salmon turn out? Pretty damned good.

Marinated overnight in low-sodium soy sauce with just a pinch of brown sugar, then patted dry and dried in front of a fan for about four hours. Ready to smoke.

A combination of alder and applewood goes into the cocktail shaker.

Two temperature probes - one for the internal temperature of the salmon and one for the ambient temperature of the smoker. We want to keep the ambient temp around 160 - 170.

Fire it up.

Riley's on salmon watch. The bear was, too. Probably smelled the salmon. We could hear her moving around in the trees, and she popped her head up a couple of times.

Done after about two hours.

Next time I'd like to get more smoke on it so I think I'd start the cold smoke earlier and let it just smoke without heat for an hour or so, then start the heat. But it was pretty damned good.

Smoked salmon, an aquarium pump and a cocktail shaker

So why did a cop follow Dean home last week? It involves an aquarium pump, smoked salmon and a cocktail shaker.

I’ve been trying to perfect a salmon smoking technique. I’ve tried using our smoker, but I need to keep the heat very low. When I turn the heat down, it stops smoking. When I turn it up so we get smoke, it’s too hot. We decided we need a cold source of smoke so we can control the smoke and the heat separately. Dean Googled and came up with a cheap and simple way to make a cold smoke generator – drill holes in the bottom of a cocktail shaker, put a pipe on top and hook an aquarium pump to one end.

He picked up a cocktail shaker and aquarium pump, and gave them to a friend who does a lot of HVAC work who was going to make the metal tubing for the top. When he got home from this errand, the first thing he said was, “A cop followed me all the way home. That was weird.” We live eight miles out in the country, so yeah, that was a little weird. Until I figured from the cop’s point of view, it looked like this:

A guy in an eye-catching shiny sports car drives up to a bar, but he doesn’t go in. Instead he gets out of the car holding a small package and walks up to another guy in the parking lot. He holds the bag open, the guy looks inside and nods. If the cop is close enough to overhear any conversation, the words “smoke” and “smoking” are featured prominently. As in “oh yeah, I can get some good smoke out of this.” He hands the bag over and they go their separate ways.

Dean: “Oh crap, he thought he was watching a drug deal.” Just then his phone buzzed – a text message from his friend. “A cop car followed me all the way home – WTF?”

Dean doesn't drive the 280Z every day, but it's the only one in town and it definitely draws attention. He can probably expect to attract some unwanted attention from the cops every time he drives the Z in the near future.