How to Make Smoked Salmon at Home - Save Money Smoke Your Own Salmom - Simple Recipe

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to my kitchen. Today we're going to show you a cheats method of making cold smoked salmon at home. So I thought while we're all locked up in our houses, I'd put together a few videos of some of the recipes that I make at home. Try and keep them as short and as sweet as I possibly can. We'll run through various different ones. Today's one though, we're going to look at cold smoked salmon. So I don't know about you, I love smoked salmon. It's really expensive though, so I kind of wanted to develop a way of doing it at home. I'm going to build a cold smoker, and I've already got a hot smoker, a metal one, but the way that I do my cold smoked salmon is I use one of these little mesh devices. So you'll see this later on in the video when we actually go and cold smoke it, but you can buy them online now for like £10 or £15, and then it uses kind of oak or hardwood dust in a spiral To give you a long, really, really long kind of 12-hour smoulder of cold smoke. And I didn't think it was going to work very well at first. Once I tried it though, the results are absolutely amazing. So I really, really recommend anyone who likes cold smoked salmon, give these recipes a go and I'm sure you'll be impressed. So first thing to say, make sure when you get your salmon, make sure it's fresh. You can't make cold smoked salmon or any kind of preserving dishes with meat that's going off or fish that's going off, and it really, really affects the quality if you use not fresh fish. So I never buy the fish unless it's got 7 days left on the date. So I've got this on here, it says the 28th of March it's going off, and we're making this on the 21st of March. I've got 7 days before the fish actually goes off, and I know where I buy this, either Aldi or Lidl, if it's got a 7-day shelf life, it's going to be really, really nice and fresh. And the quality is good as well. It's good quality farmed salmon. Obviously, if you can get a nice wild salmon from someone, even better, but the kind of stocks aren't very good at the moment, so I know it's very difficult to get hold of wild salmon. So get a good quality farmed, preferably Scottish salmon, they're the really good ones, and have a go at making this recipe. So the first thing you want to do is take it out the pack. So the first thing you'll notice when you take it out the pack is that they've always got the scales on, and it's a real pain. I wish they came with the scales off. I don't know anybody who wants the scales on there, so Aldi, Lidl, any supermarkets, if you're listening, when you portion up your salmon, please scale it. Makes it so much easier to do anything with. That's my kind of pet hate out of the way early on. So as you can see, really nice kind of cut of salmon. The first thing that I do, I go and have a smell. It shouldn't smell fishy, it shouldn't smell off. It's got a really nice kind of fresh smell of the sea, it's good to go. You want to get the biggest possible piece you can get. And always treat it as a whole like that. So when you're smoking it, you need the skin on, so don't be tempted to try and take this skin off. You can take it off at the end when you come to cut it if you want. I find it easier to cut with it on, but you want to keep the skin on for the salting, the air drying, and the smoking process. So we'll just take this over here and get all the scales off. It's a bit of a messy job, so you just need to do it in the sink, get rid of all the scales, and then come back. So I'll go and do this over by the sink, but I'm just going to give you a kind of quick demo of what you actually do. So you have the scales running in this direction, and if you go like that, you don't get any resistance. If you go this way, you can kind of feel the scales, they start to come off. So you want to take a knife, doesn't need to be sharp, but obviously if you keep your knife sharp, you can do it with a sharp knife. And you just want to start scraping it like that, and you'll see them start to fly off. So you need to kind of do that all over, make sure you get absolutely every single last scale off, and then we can move on to the next step. Just to give you a bit of a demo halfway through, you can see this side over here, I've taken the scales off, and then this side has still got the scales on. So just so you can kind of see the difference on that. So then once you've scaled it, this is what it looks like. Now you want to kind of give that a really, really good wash. Make sure that you get absolutely every single last scale off the fish, and make sure you take your time with the knife getting absolutely every single scale off. If you rub your finger over it like that, you can feel it. No scales should be there. No scales should come off in your hand. And then what you want to do is you want to kind of dry that down with some clean kitchen paper, and then that's ready to go. So then the next step is you need to get a pair of sterile tweezers, and you need to go through all the way along the bone here, and you need to pick out pin bones with the tweezers. It's a very satisfying job to do, although it is a little bit tedious. They do come out really, really cleanly. You don't tend to break, but you just need to be quite— just be really slow and steady. Make sure that you get absolutely every single one. It's not nice to have any kind of pin bones in your smoked salmon. So like I say, just go through, pick out absolutely every single pin bone, dry it with some kitchen towel, some clean kitchen towel, and just leave that to air dry kind of for a few minutes until the next step. So then you want to dry down all the salmon like that, nice clean kitchen towel, and you just want to get that as dry as you possibly can. So I promise you, that is the worst bit of it over with. If you've got a good quality fishmonger, they'll do all of that work for you, so you need to make sure you get the full Full side of salmon, all of the scales taken off, all of the pin bones taken out, and then you can kind of jump ahead to this point here. So there are 4 main steps when it comes to smoking a salmon. Preparation, so you're either getting your fillets or your fish, you're getting it to a point which is this, where you've got your side of salmon, no scales, no pin bones, that's the prep work. Then you've got the salting, stage 2 is the salting, where you apply a liberal amount of salt both to the skin and the flesh side. That's to draw out the moisture. That's how you preserve a salmon predominantly, is by reducing the moisture content and meaning that the bacteria can't grow or thrive. Step 3 is the drying. Now, this is a really important step that I didn't realise when I first started making smoked salmon. You need to form what's called a pellicle on the outside of the salmon. Sounds really, really technical, but it's not. It means after stage 2, once you've salted it, you wash all of the salt off, you dry it again, and then you hang it up somewhere really cool. For 24 hours to let all of that moisture evaporate from the fish, and you let the salt content equalize throughout it as well. And you get like a tacky finish on the outside, that's called a pellicle. And that pellicle means that the smoke from stage 4, the 4th stage smoking, will adhere to the salmon a lot better. So 4 stages. Number 1, prep. Number 2, salting. Number 3, drying. Number 4— Smoking. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do here is we're going to apply some salt. So I told you this is a cheats method. This is just the way that I do it. There's a million and one other ways to do it here. People use brine, people use other ingredients. My method is salt, table salt. That's it, nothing else. So when I first started making salmon, I got really, really kind of caught up on the weight of salt compared to the weight of the salmon. I now, I just do it by eye. I know roughly kind of how much salt I want to use, and I always err on the side of caution with the salt. It's horrible if you get too much salt on it. So I will, I'll do a bit of research on it again and put the specific weights up from the recipes that I've had previously. But I always know that the recipes give you, they give you too much salt to put on them. So you kind of see roughly how much I put on. All I say is just err on the side of caution. So the salt that we're using here is just completely standard table salt, the cheapest salt you can get. Needs to be a nice fine texture, although it will work with rock salt. I don't think you need it. So all I do is I just kind of liberally apply the salt on like that. I put more on the fatter end of the salmon because it's got more meat to penetrate. And that's it, do you know what I mean? Only 4 pinches really on each side. I'll do the same on this one. I mean, all you're trying to do with the salt here is— the aim isn't seasoning. The seasoning is kind of like a bit of an added extra. What you're doing is you're trying to draw that moisture out. So make sure that you've got an even coverage of salt on one side, flip it over, and then salt this side again. Like I say, the fatter end you want a little bit more, and then less towards the thinner end. Just make sure it's covering all the areas. You shouldn't see big kind of piles of salt anywhere. It should kind of immediately almost dissolve onto the skin. Same on this one. So just make sure it's fully covered. Some people use sugar as well. I don't like it with sugar. I don't think that a good quality salmon needs the sugar. Salt will give you everything that you need, and then you get the good flavour from the oak or the smoke that you're going to use. So just salt, like I say, it's the cheats method. Really, really simple. Just salmon, salt, and good quality oak smoke. So that's it. So what you need to do now is you need to take your salted salmon and you can wrap this up in some cling film. If you've got some glass containers, you can lay them down in the glass containers. You want to put this in the fridge for about 24 hours. Now, it's kind of a little bit dependent on the size of the fillet or the size of the side of salmon that you're using. 24 hours might be a bit too much. I tend to kind of check it after about 12 to 18 hours. You can see if there's lots and lots of moisture that's come out of it and it's kind of toughened up to the feel, then you're pretty much good to go. Remember, the purpose of this is to drive off the moisture in order the bacteria can't take hold, and you're preserving your salmon that way. It's not the smoke that's actually preserving your salmon, you're just using that for flavour. But for a kind of homemade salmon like this, the ultimate aim, the ultimate aim isn't to kind of preserve it for as long as possible, it's to give it a good flavour. You can stick this in the freezer straight away once you're complete, And it will keep for, I mean, it will keep for months in the freezer anyway. So you're doing this kind of to add flavour and to preserve it at the same time, but don't worry too much about the kind of preservative qualities of the salt. So like I say, anywhere in between 12 to 24 hours in the refrigerator, and then we move on to the next stage. So you can wrap these up in cling film, you can put them in a glass container. The method that I've used, which I think is really neat, is I use a vacuum-sealed pack. So I'll show you how that works now. So you just take one of these kind of vacuum-sealed bags like this. It's open-ended on both ends. You seal one end up in your vacuum sealer. You put both of the salmons in flesh to flesh, or if they'll fit side by side, and then you seal it up, suck all of the air out, and then that could just be placed in the fridge. And the real benefit of that is that none of the liquid kind of leaks out anywhere over your fridge. So it's a really nice, neat, clean hygienic solution to doing this. So take your salmons and you're just popping them inside the bag. So then once you've got it in the bag like that, you seal it up in the vacuum packing machine. And that is the end product there. So that's good to go in the fridge now. Doesn't matter if you don't get all the air out of it. Sometimes these machines take a little bit of a while to warm up. That's worked quite well there. But all you're trying to do there is stop any spillage out into the fridge. So just to summarize it again, you've got the 4 steps. You've got the prep, the salt, the dry, and the smoke. So the first part of this video, we've just done the prep, cleaned all the scales off, taken out the bones, dried it down, salted it. I'll put the amount of salt up that I used per kilogram of salmon. And then we've sealed it in a bag and then we pop it in the fridge and we wait 12 to 18 hours. We take that off and then we'll move on to the next stage. Right, so welcome back. We're on to the next stage of the smoked salmon recipe now. So this packet has been in the fridge for about 18 hours. I think that's kind of my sweet spot, around 18 hours. You can tell that it's really firmed up and you'll see the amount of liquid that's coming off of it. So just to summarize what we've done, we've done the prep stage, we've done the salting stage, and now we're moving on to the drying stage. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take it out of the plastic, give it a nice clean down, make sure it's dry, and then we're gonna go and hang it outside for 24 hours to properly dry. So just undo the plastic. There'll be a lot of liquid in here, so just beware of that. And you can kind of really feel that it's like properly stiffened up. And then we're going to take it outside and we're going to hang it up to dry. So we're up in the top of the garden now. This is where is the best place for me to dry my salmon. So what you need, and you can do this in the fridge, and I often do just do it in the fridge, it works really well in the fridge. You need a dry, airy environment. So the important thing is that the humidity is low and it's dry. So what works really well for me though, this is our chicken coop. And then we have the shed on top, so it's completely waterproof from the top. And then what we do is we hang the salmon right in the middle. I do this as all sorts of charcuterie as well, salamis and sausages and things like that. It's completely free from any kind of vermin or disease. Like, the chickens can't get anywhere near it. If there are any mice or vermin, they can't get up. It's hanging kind of like 2 meters off the ground. And then what's really great here though is obviously the roof keeps the water off, but then you get a really good throughput of air which dries the salmon down, and that's what you need. You just want to kind of make sure that all of that moisture is evaporated from it. So the salt does kind of 90% of that for you, and then what you're doing here is you're driving off the remainder of that moisture and you're getting what I said, that pellicle being formed. This is stage 3. We're going to hang the salmon outside in a nice dry environment. It needs to be cool, so this is a good time to do it. Temperatures tonight are kind of forecast to go down to about 2 degrees. Absolutely perfect for this. Don't let them dip into freezing though, you don't want them freezing, but kind of anywhere between like 2 and 5 degrees will work really, really well, and a windy day is even better for that. So, as you can see, the salmon's now hanging up and drying. I attach a couple of stainless steel hooks on, and then I wrap loads of twine around the thin end of the salmon. You need to make sure that it's really tight. The last thing you want is to come back the next day and it's kind of fallen down onto the floor. As I said, we're in a kind of like covered position here. No water is going to get in from the top. You've got lots of nice air coming through. That's what's going to help drive off the remaining of the moisture. You can hear the cockerel in the background. He's very happy about it. But the salmon, I mean, it's that far off the ground. There's absolutely no way that any animals can jump up and get it. I always dry all of my charcuterie in this position, and it works really, really well. You can see behind me, this is my salami cage that I use. Um, I thought at first that I needed to protect the salamis kind of from anything outside the cage. I did a test, some inside and some outside, and the ones outside were absolutely fine. So I don't really need to use that anymore. I know that hanging them here is completely kind of rodent-proof, vermin-proof. None of the birds can get at it because it's kind of secure on all 4 sides like that. Um, so we will wait until tomorrow. This comes out here today at about kind of like half 4 in the evening. We'll come out Sunday morning and check on it, but it'll be perfect and ready to go. This stage, remember, is the drying stage, so you're trying to dry off the remainder of that moisture, but more important, you want to form that sticky pellicle on the, on the outside of it, which allows the smoke to adhere to the salmon properly. So we'll cut back tomorrow morning and you'll see how we set up the smoker to get ready for stage 4, which is smoking. So I'm back outside with the salmon now. It's about 8 o'clock in the morning, it's still nice and cool, about 5 degrees, lovely sunny day, and the wind's died down a lot as well. So as you can see with the salmon, it's really dried up now, and you get this really kind of like tacky glossy finish on the outside of the salmon, and that's exactly what you need in order to get the smoke to adhere to it properly. So I'll try and get a close-up of it, you can see though it's kind of got that air-dried effect, there's absolutely no moisture on the front or the back. And it's like a real kind of glossy finish, almost like a satin wood finish. That's exactly what you're looking for. So we can move on to the next stage now, which is stage 4, smoking. Right, so we're out in the back garden now with the smoker for stage 4 of smoking the salmon, and this is the machine that I use. So it's a really, really simple design. They cost about £15. You use it with kind of oak or any hardwood shavings or dust. You start it over there with like a little candle, and then it works its way around, all the way around until it gets to the end. You get about 12 hours smoke on it. As you can see, it's like a really gentle smoke. You're not looking to create heat from this, you're looking just to create a kind of really nice gentle smoke in order to give flavour to your salmon. So the way that I've designed it, and you can do this with any kind of container at all, is you just want a nice clean empty container. Anything will do, so a large box, you can build it yourself. I find kind of like an old food-grade steel drum works really, really well. And then you just put this in the bottom and then it will kind of give you 12 hours worth of smoke. So here we are, this is what the salmon looks like after it's been prepped, salted, and air dried. You can see a lot better in this light the tacky sheen of the salmon. And then the way that we smoke it is you take this You just hook your salmon underneath so it doesn't come into contact with anything, and then you just place that into the smoker like this. You don't want to close it completely up. If you close it completely up, you'll lose— the smoke will basically go out. You need to have like a little bit of airflow kind of moving through it. So some people, you can drill holes if you're only using your drum for that. If you drill a few holes kind of at the base, then that will bring enough air to kind of keep that ember going. But I find if you just kind of keep the top open like that, it keeps enough smoke in there. So we smoke this now for kind of like between 8 to 12 hours. It's a really, really light smoke, so it can handle— it can take the 12 hours. So we'll come back 12 hours later and we'll have smoked salmon. So as you can see, the salmon's just kind of hanging there. It's not touching anything. You've just got a really, really thin, light smoke. From that smoker there. You can see it's kind of burning its way around. That will just continue now for the next 12 hours, and then we'll come back and we'll have perfect smoked salmon. So this is what the salmon look like after being smoked for 12 hours. They take on a kind of really nice golden colour, and you can really, really smell the smoke on them. So we're going to take these inside now, and I'll show you how to prepare them and get them ready for storage. Right, so we're back inside with the salmon now. We've completed the 4 stages, so we've prepped it, we've salted it, we've dried it, and we've smoked it. And you can really kind of feel from the end product, and you can see kind of the way that it's curled up like that, the moisture content's really, really been reduced, and we've kind of achieved our aim of giving it a really nice flavour with the smoke, but also kind of preserving it by reducing the moisture content so that the bacteria can't thrive. So then what I do is I put it down on the board like that, And then the way to slice it is you just kind of angle your knife and do really, really thin slices like that. Aim is to kind of get it as thin as you possibly can. That's the nicest way of eating it. You just continue to kind of cut it at an angle, and it still remains kind of moist and oily in the centre, and then you'll get like a nice ring of smoke around the edge. So now that you've made all this salmon, how are you going to store it? And the best way that I find to store it is you literally cut it up into 3 pieces, wrap it in cling film, or use a kind of vacuum pack like I did originally, and pop it in the freezer. The freezer is by far and away the best way of storing smoked salmon, and it's probably the safest way as well, because when you freeze it, you kill any of the kind of bacteria that may still be present on the salmon. So that's the way that I do it. I chop it into 3 pieces. I still leave the skin on. Remember, you've taken all of those scales off the skin. I don't eat the skin because it goes a bit leathery after you salt it, but you'll see as you kind of slice through it, it's quite easy just to avoid the skin anyway. But I think when you freeze it, it's a lot easier to kind of keep the skin on. So just take a piece of cling film, put your salmon in the cling film, And just wrap it up. And then that's ready to go in the freezer. If you're going to eat it straight away, I'd still recommend doing this step, and then you keep it in the fridge for at least 24 hours. That helps the smoke to permeate all the way through into the, into the flesh and gives you a much better product at the end. So that's it, we've come to the end of the video. That's how you make smoked salmon. I appreciate it turns into quite a long video, but the steps don't actually take that huge amount of time. It's the kind of waiting around for it to salt and for it to dry and for it to smoke. So overall, it's easily— you can do it in a weekend if you kind of start on a Friday evening. You get to Sunday night and you kind of get some smoked salmon that you can eat, and it's probably taken all of maybe 30 or 40 minutes of my time to actually kind of put together all of these bits and bobs to make the smoked salmon. So that's it, we've come to the end of the video. This is the end product, a nice cold smoked salmon. It's really easy to make at home, there's not that many steps to it, like I say, 4 steps. The prep, the salting, the drying, and then the smoking. Use this video as a bit of a guide, you've got all the information to do it with. Like I say, just make sure you're using a really, really fresh salmon and take kind of adequate precaution for all of the temperatures as I've discussed throughout this video. So we've got plenty more of these videos to come. Really hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every single video we do, and I'll see you next time. Bye.