Monthly Archives: November 2011

Creamy home-smoked salmon pasta

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Time: 10 minutes – Patience: 10 minutes – Difficulty: Simple – Knackyness: Low

Yesterday, I had a first experiment at curing and smoking salmon at home.  Tonight, I made a creamy smoked salmon pasta with the cold smoked fillet I’d produced.

Smoked salmon pasta - some ingredientsIngredients –

  • One tail fillet of home-smoked salmon, around 100g
  • Two home-reared pullet’s eggs
  • One clove of home-smoked garlic, crushed
  • A small handful of grated parmesan or pecorino
  • A glug of double cream
  • Pasta of your choice, sufficient for two portions

Method –

  • In a dry frying pan, start to cook your whole smoked salmon fillet
  • In a large saucepan, bring some salted water to the boil
  • Add the pasta to the boiling water, along with a pinch of salt and a glug of olive oil
  • Once the salmon fillet is cooked, break it up into flakes in the pan, then add the crushed garlic clove and continue to fry gently for a couple more minutes
  • Meanwhile, in a bowl or jug, beat the eggs with a fork, add the glug of double cream and 2/3rds of the grated parmesan, along with a generous pinch of cracked black pepper
  • Once the pasta is cooked, drain and return to the saucepan.
  • Add the liquid ingredients to the frying pan with the salmon and garlic, and almost immediately transfer all of these into the drained pasta
  • Mix swiftly, the heat from the pasta will cook the egg, and the texture should end up thick and glossy.  But don’t worry if it looks a bit like scrambled egg with salmon in it, it will still taste marvellous
  • Serve into two bowls, topped with the rest of the grated parmesan

Simple, tasty, and all the key ingredients home-produced. And done in the ten minutes it takes to cook the pasta. What could be better?

Verdict on the smoked salmon? Undoubted success. Cooked in this dish it is distinctively and recognisably smoked salmon, has a good firm texture and slightly salty flavour and lovely smokey aroma.  Result!

I have an apology to make, however – it was a long day at work, and I was hungry… so I didn’t stop to take photos of the cooked dish, I just ate it!

A little bit fishy – first attempt at smoked salmon

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Time: 15 minutes – Patience: 24 hours – Difficulty: Easy – Knackyness: Low

As the smoker build was progressing well, my mind of course turned to what to put in for the first experimental firing along with the piece of bacon I’ve been curing this week.

I’ve never smoked or even cured fish before but there were a couple of tail-piece salmon fillets in the Co-op this afternoon.  Opinions seem to vary incredibly widely on how long one should cure the salmon for (and indeed whether table salt or curing salt are required), whether to dry cure or brine, and then how long a smoke is required (with opinions ranging from 6 to 36 hours!).  Since I planned to run the smoker the next morning, and the fillet is small and thin (and has also been robbed of it’s skin – something I didn’t notice when I bought it) I went for the lowest of all the estimations, and the simplest of approaches.

I used:

  • A 125g farmed Atlantic salmon tail fillet (skinless – not ideal)
  • Very simple dry cure made from 30g of sea salt and 15g of golden caster sugar

Salmon, with cure appliedWeighed down with tinRub the cure generously into both sides of the fish with some extra under the fillet.  Then weigh the fillet down with a plate and a can of tomatoes to encourage the water to come out of it.  Leave the fillet like this in the fridge for six hours.

Salmon fillet after curingAfter six hours the fillet should be flatter, firmer, darker in colour and lighter in weight.  The photograph is the same fillet as above.  After six hours of curing there was lots of salt still left in the bowl, along with quite a bit of pickle (the liquid which has oozed out of the fish).  The fillet, rinsed and dried weighed 111g, a 14g weight loss in water in six hours.

Now put the fish, uncovered, on a rack in the fridge overnight.  In the morning it will have formed a shiny pellicle, and lost a bit more weight (mine was 109g by this time).  Time now to load my home-built cold smoker for it’s maiden voyage…

Salmon after smoking - skinned sideSalmon fillet after smokingAfter ten hours of cold oak smoke, the fillet is 106g (a 19g total weight loss which is about 16% – not far off the 17-18% I’ve seen recommended).  It has a glossy, slightly oily surface, a firm texture, and smells more of smoke than it does of fish.    I would describe it as ‘lightly smoked’, for reasons I’ll discuss further in the write-up of the first (rather experimental!) burn in the smoker.  Because I don’t know enough about the storage conditions of the fillet before I bought it, I plan to cook with it instead of eating it raw – probably tomorrow night. Expect a post-sampling update!

Smokin’!! DIY Cold Smoker – design and build

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Time: 4 hours build time – Difficulty: Easy – Knackyness: Moderate (woodworking skills & equipment required)  – Cost: around £50

I’ve wanted to try cold smoking for a long time.  Hot smoking is an easily solved problem, modify a BBQ with a lid or some heavy duty tinfoil and add some woodchips, or even on the kitchen hob burning rice in an un-loved saucepan and steamer with the cooker hood running full pelt.  Hot smoked food is tasty enough, but though our American cousins have raised it to an art-form, I can’t get terribly excited about it.

Cold smoking, on the other hand, is far more interesting.  It requires more complicated equipment and, a bit like curing, feels like a sort of culinary alchemy.  The knack is to fill a space with sufficiently thick smoke for a long enough period to flavour your food, without raising the temperature so high that the food starts to cook, or worse, is at risk of spoilng.   Now someone observant once said, ‘no smoke without fire’, and therein lies the problem.  The internet, and the various books published on the subject, have a wide variety of different designs for low-cost home smokers.  The involve oil drums, modified fridges and filing cabinets, air conditioning duct, garden sheds, breeze blocks, and innumerable other approaches.  There are high tech ‘smoke generators’ and low tech fires in holes in the ground.  Then there are the purpose built smokers like the lovely-looking ones Bradley make, but they’re a bit outside my budget.

My smoker is a variation on a wooden box, and uses the ProQ cold smoke generator, which burns sawdust, as a smoke source.  I have built my smoker out of new wood, though I would have preferred to have used reclaimed wood – both on cost and ecological grounds.  If you are using reclaimed or scrap wood do make sure it’s clean and hasn’t been treated with any toxic wood preservatives.  The roof is a spare slate I happened to have, you may need to come up with something different. The structure is assembled from 2.5cm square section timber and covered with tongue-and-groove cladding, using various screws and fixings you are likely have in your toolbox.

What I bought to make the smoker –

  • The ProQ smoke generator and a few bags of wood dust
  • Set of 3 non-stick cooling racks (mine were from Amazon, but a cookshop would have similar products)
  • Four 2.5cm square 1.8m lengths of timber
  • Ten 1.8m lengths of tongue-and-groove cladding board
  • Four magnetic clips

I also used the following items I already had –

  • Wood saw, tape measure, screw driver
  • Electric drill and screwdriver, work bench (not essential, but useful)
  • Variety of screws, pins, fencing staples
  • A roof slate
  • Wood glue
  • Water-based shed stain

Smoker Frame

Smoker frame, size relative to rack

Dimensions of the smoker are 1.1m high at the front, 1.0m high at the back.  The width and depth are based on the size of the racks you want to use.

First, build the frame.  It will probably look something like this (note it is slightly narrower than the width of the rack.  Secure the horizontal timbers with long wood screws.

Frame showing slots for racksSlot the front vertical timbers to hold the racks.  The choice of spacings is yours, I placed a slot about every 15cm from about 40cm above the ground.  We cut the slots with a large drill bit and tidied up with a chisel.  There’s a bit of hit-and-miss here and while all the slots are not equally beautiful, they should do the job.  You could also slot the back timbers, but we decided to use small screws here with their heads proud to support the back of the racks,  also preventing backward and forward slip.  The highest slot is positioned to allow a rack to rest on the side timbers to take the weight of items hanging from it on hooks.

Applying claddingNext cover the back and sides with cladding going from floor level all the way to the top of the frame, including the triangle sections at the top of the sides.  I glued the tongue and groove for extra stability.  You could equally use plywood to clad the box.  We used fencing staples to secure the cladding to the frame.  Panel pins would be more traditional.

Complete smoker - openI want the whole front of the smoker box to be removable, in two sections – a large top section to allow me to load and unload the smoker racks and hooks, and a small bottom strip to allow management and monitoring of the smoke generator without letting all the smoke ‘escape’ from the box during use.  I built the main panel and secured it with three strips of 1cm baton.  The top and bottom baton positions are chosen to rest on the horizontal timbers forming the front of the structure, taking the weight of the front panel.  Four magnetic clips hold the front panel snugly in place.  The angle of the roof will allow a 1cm ventilation gap above the front panel.  A final length of cladding is used horizontally for the bottom section.

Complete smoker - closedFixing the roof will depend on your materials.  For the time being my slate just rests carefully on top, in due course we’ll come up with some sort of clip arrangement.  A plywood roof could be screwed in place.  I’m going to use a knackered old baking tray on the floor of the smoker to catch ash and any drips from the food.

The outside of the smoker will be painted with water based fence and shed stain.  The inside will not be painted, and I hope that with time exposure to smoke should provide a good seal to these surfaces.

Next, the first very experimental firing…  I can hardly wait!

Read more DIY Cold Smoker & Home-Curing posts >>

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