How To: Cure and Smoke Salmon
By Chuck Sudo in Food on Apr 20, 2010 4:00PM
Start off with some nice salmon fillets
For the cure: 1 cup kosher salt, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon orange zest, 1 bunch parsley, 1 bunch cilantro, 3 sliced shallots
Cover each fillet with curing compound, greens, zest and shallot.
Wrap tightly in plastic wrap, place in a baking dish and let cure for 48 hours.
Remove the wrap. Rinse off each fillet and pad dry with paper towels. Now, on to the pastrami portion of the recipe. You\'ll need 1/4 cup black peppercorns, 1/4 cup coriander seeds and molasses.
Toast the peppercorns and coriander seeds over medium-high heat.
Crack the peppercorns and coriander.
Brush the fillets with molasses.
Sprinkle the peppercorns and coriander on the fillets, pressing them gently into the fish.
Wrap tightly and allow to sit for anywhere from 48 hours to a week. these sat for 72 hours
The salmon fillets, ready for smoking.
Place the fillets in a smoker, allow a \<strike\>cold\<\/strike\> hot smoke for 1-2 hours over hickory. Make sure to keep temperature constant so as not to cook the filets, or else you wind up with...
this. It didn\'t make nice pastrami (the fish flaked at the sight of a fork and knife), but having a lot of smoked salmon on hand is also a good thing.
Example, we took 2 ounces of some smoked salmon and made this dish, with white wine cream sauce, peas, scallions, lemon zest and dill over whole wheat pasta.
Rick Tramonto has a new cookbook coming out next week. Steak With Friends compiles 150 recipes for entertaining friends in the backyard or in the kitchen. As a charcuterie enthusiast, one recipe that caught our eye was a for salmon pastrami with cucumber dill salad. Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn have a few salmon curing recipe in Charcuterie, including one for salmon pastrami, and a quick search on epicurious for gravlax turns up some interesting recipes. But we never tried it. So we took the Tramonto recipe, then smoked it later.
Ingredients
3 lbs. salmon fillet
1 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup sugar (we used turbinado)
3 shallots, sliced
1 bunch parsley, chopped
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
molasses
1/4 cup black peppercorns
1/4 coriander seeds
Temperature control is essential when smoking, so as not to cook the meat or fish. What we wound up with wasn't pastrami — the salmon flaked as soon as a knife or fork touched it — but having a lot of smoked salmon around the house isn't a bad thing. The instructions for this recipe are listed with each photo, to give you some narrative. We're definitely going to try this again.
