smokin....

Relax in southern comfort on the east bank of the Mississippi. You're just around the corner from Beale Street and Sun Records. Watch the ducks, throw back a few and tell us what's on your mind.
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JR.
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smokin....

Post by JR. »

I need new projects like a hole in the head, but here is another one...

Last month my neighbor offered me two smokers he was throwing away on junk day... One seems like a pretty nice big box shaped weber and a smaller round one...

I am not big on grilling outdoors but an old (actually long time, not old) friend of mine swears to the merits of smoking meat, so I decided to experiment...

First I smoked a huge pork butt (8# that I had to eat myself :lol: )... But the more interesting experiment was to smoke some salmon for my once every 3 weeks lunch meal cook session. I make a huge batch and freeze around 20 portions to cover the next 3 weeks. For years I have been using a few pounds of cheap canned Salmon ($2.50 #). Since I didn't know any better i ate my lunch and didn't complain, but a couple weeks ago I smoked up some fresh salmon to use in the same lunch dish and the difference is night and day better. As Trump would say the difference was HUGE.

So now I'm hooked, but smoking salmon is a bit of a pain in the A___. You need to cook it low and slow for a long time. My free smoker, gets too hot from a full load of charcoal. If you cook the salmon too hot, too fast, it drives the good stuff oozing out. So low and slow, but still hot enough to get the fish up to 150' or so inside (for safety).

Charcoal fire and low and slow, do not mix... unless I pay constant attention to the fire (for several hours) it goes off temperature, and even goes out... I know, this sounds like a job for cybernetic control. :lol: But even I am weary of designing a dedicated microprocessor controller for every project. So this time I decided to use some off the shelf technology.

I bought a 1500W hot plate to stick in the bottom of the smoker and a digital temp controller (adjustable up to 220'), marginal for some smoking tasks but perfect for low and slow salmon. Yesterday was my first trial with cybernetic control and my 1500W heat source was seriously under powered. From observation the steel box (painted black to radiate heat better) is something like a 15 square foot heat sink radiating heat away from my hot box. The best I could do was get the air temp inside the box up to just under 150'... not enough heat to get my fish that hot on the inside. Don't worry about the fish. I wrapped it in aluminum foil and put it inside the oven for 30 minutes to get it safely hot enough. Actually that is called cold smoking... smoking it first at low temp then cooking it. But not my original plan or desire.

I just ordered some 1" thick rigid fiberglas insulation. I figure if I surround the steel box with decent insulation (K factor 0.23) I can dramatically cut down the heat losses to ambient and get up to 175' or maybe higher inside, enough to cook my salmon and smoke it too. I could easily cook the salmon in the oven or a pan, but smoking it added a nice extra flavor to my normally mundane "same thing every day" lunch.

I also had some drama sourcing the salmon... canned is cheap but you get what you pay for. :( , the top shelf for Hickory MS, is "never frozen" salmon while not exactly fresh, just not hard frozen (probably farmed atlantic salmon from Chile or somewhere shipped in a refrigerated boat). The first batch of "never frozen" ended up in my trash bin because it smelled like never refrigerated. :evil: The next week I tried another sample of "Never frozen" with almost a week left on it's use by date label and it was OK... actually quite good, but at $8 a pound with all the extra drama about getting maybe good fish, i looked for another option, and that is flash frozen while actually fresh salmon. I can get 8 small fillets in a 2# package of alaskan salmon for $9 so half the price of the "never frozen" and surely safe. Another option is a single huge fillet, 1 3/4 # for $9 so in the same price ball park...

The good news is the electric conversion does not require me constantly stoking the fire, so next question is can I get it hot enough, or will I have to continue cold smoking the salmon...

I have about one more week of lunch servings left in my freezer so next weekend looks like my target deadline to get the box insulated and cooking hotter.

If i wanted to be hip i could use two temp controllers in series and have a second one measure the temp inside the fish, so regulator one manages the smoker to say 175' air temp, and regulator two cuts off the whole thing when the fish reaches 150' inside. These can be plugged in series and it will just try to regulate the fish to 150'. If my smoker can't make too hot of a temp I can just put my one temp controller into the fish (we'll see).

But for now I'll be happy just to get the heat up hotter inside my smoker box... I was able to make smoke like a charm, some wood chips in small aluminum container sitting on the hot plate converted the chips to smoke nicely.

Hopefully I'm closer to the end than the middle of this DIY conversion project. So far no solder was melted or software coded up. :D

JR

[edit] my hot plate has an internal thermal breaker of some sort... I suspect it is a one shot so one and done. I will need to be careful about running it wide open with nothing on top of it. I could boil water on it, that will help heat transfer, keep top plate temp down, and still support box temps up around 200'. I need to experiment to see if i can make smoke and steam at same time (in two different containers of course). [/edit]
Last edited by JR. on Mon Jul 04, 2016 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Gold
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Re: smokin....

Post by Gold »

Now all you need is a good bagel.

I hope to find some local smoked trout from the Adirondacks. I love smoked trout. I learned that the Adirondacks was never settled by Native Americans. It was too inhospitable. The growing season isn't long enough to grow corn so no real agriculture could happen. I imagine it wasn't so different than it is now. The Mohawk, Algonquin and Oneida would head to the mountains for the summer. Plenty of fish and game. I bet they came home with a bunch of smoked trout and other fish.

As another aside I learned that Adirondack literally translates as "bark eater" in the Mohawk language. I knew that. I just learned that adirondack was the Mohawk name for porcupine. So adirondack more correctly translates as porcupine.
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JR.
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Re: smokin....

Post by JR. »

Gold wrote:Now all you need is a good bagel.
I've cooked my own bagels but they aren't as good as I remember growing up in north jersey, just outside NYC. After staying out way too late at the pool hall, we would steal a fresh bagel (still warm) from the next day's delivery dropped off at the still closed food market next door. Those were really good as I recall. :D

I suspect you want cream cheese on you lox and bagel?
I hope to find some local smoked trout from the Adirondacks. I love smoked trout. I learned that the Adirondacks was never settled by Native Americans. It was too inhospitable. The growing season isn't long enough to grow corn so no real agriculture could happen. I imagine it wasn't so different than it is now. The Mohawk, Algonquin and Oneida would head to the mountains for the summer. Plenty of fish and game. I bet they came home with a bunch of smoked trout and other fish.

As another aside I learned that Adirondack literally translates as "bark eater" in the Mohawk language. I knew that. I just learned that adirondack was the Mohawk name for porcupine. So adirondack more correctly translates as porcupine.
Bark eater sounds like a beaver.

Where I grew up in NJ the local indians were Lenni Lenape or something like that, down here in MS the Choctaw tribe is still around, with their own casino.

JR

PS: Roger can probably walk out his back yard and catch fresh salmon.... :lol:
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JR.
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Re: smokin....

Post by JR. »

Making progress on my cybernetic controlled smoker...

Last weekend it topped out at 150'F. In my judgement there was too much heat leaking from the exterior surface area of the big steel box. Today I attached some 1" thick medium density fiberglas insulation around the top 2' of the metal box. I just love working fiberglass insulation with temps in the mid-hi 90's. Even after a shower I'm still itching. :oops:

I set the digital thermostat for 160', and it took over an hour to get there but it was up dithering around 162' so the insulation is working as planned. I can surely get it hotter if needed. Not sure I need to get a lot hotter. Many recommend 140' for final internal temp with salmon. Cold smoking is done at 80'F but my smoker was 95'F before i turned the heat on. :lol:

=====

I am still wrestling with sourcing good salmon. I like the frozen salmon I can get in nowhere MS but reading the small print it appears that the wild US caught salmon gets flash frozen then shipped to China for processing. I'm guessing thawed out in China, butchered and deboned, then refrozen. As long as they hold it down to -10'F or so for several hours it kills most parasites so cooking final temp is less critical You really need to get it up to 150' to kill everything, but hard frozen is probably safe raw.

Another reported benefit of frozen salmon is that the freezing breaks the cell walls so brining can pull water out better and flesh is more tender. This may be spin from people who want to sell frozen salmon, but I like the part about killing parasites.

I now have a 2# salmon fillet defrosting in the refrigerator over night. Tomorrow I will soak in brine all day (I make my brine with dark beer too). Then tomorrow night I will rinse the brine off and let it dry over night. Ideally you want the salmon to form a dry outer skin (pericle?) before smoking. So Saturday the smoker gets the real trial.

=======
This is a lot of work, probably easier to just slow cook the frozen salmon in my crock pot. Unfortunately my first (actually second) experiment smoking turned out so good, I need to try to repeat that success again. :D

JR
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JR.
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Re: smokin....

Post by JR. »

controller.JPG
controller.JPG (57.26 KiB) Viewed 11071 times
Here is picture of temp controller reading 90' ( in the shade) before turning on any heat.

heres a wider picture
[attachment=0]smoker.JPG[/attachment]

Not very pretty but it works. I have some matching tape that I can trim off the edges with but this was never about pretty.

The wire going into the top is for the thermocouple(?) that plugs into the controller. The box is roughly 2 1/2' tall, I covered the top 2' as that was most effective use of 2x4' sheets of insulation. I cut out a hole for the door thermometer, but that is redundant at this point. I may open up the hole in the top so smoke can escape, but i don't want to lose too much heat.

Salmon is defrosted and soaking in brine in my refrigerator. Tonight I will rinse it off to dry off over night. Early tomorrow into the smoker low and slow... I may not even wait to reach final temp in the smoker, but mix the salmon into the rest of the vegetables still in my crock pot to reach final cooking temperature there. I just need to get it well smoked first. 8-)

Still a lot more work than just opening a few cans of salmon.

JR

PS: I suspect i may get sucked into buying some premium frozen salmon, (not processed in china). The argument about farmed vs wild salmon, is a little squishy, since a lot of "wild" pacific salmon is from hatcheries that they release into the ocean, and then harvest when they return, so not completely wild, kind of like pet salmon... :lol: Of course farmed salmon is notorious for substandard growing conditions inside pens.
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JR.
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Re: smokin....

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Here is this mornings smoked salmon... The white ooze is albumin (coagulated protein). Next time I will start even lower temps and slower... My temp controller claims 1' accuracy but over-shoots a bunch, there must be huge lag due to thermal mass of the metal cooker, etc. Still a lot better than trying to manage temps with charcoal fire.

This has already been flaked up and mixed into my vegetables already cooking in the crock pot. The mix will cook another hour to insure the salmon hits 165' final, but hard frozen fish is generally free of pathogens so not very worried about final temp..

JR
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Re: smokin....

Post by JR. »

Today I smoked up a batch of ribs and they were gooood... The smoker had trouble getting much above 180' (target temp was 220') but cold smoking is OK. After a few hours the ribs only got up to 120' internal, so i covered them with aluminum foil and put them into the real oven to finish.

200' final internal temp and meat fell off the bones.... tasty...

I just used some store bough rub this time and don't expect to make a habit of this (kind of fatty), but good taste experience.

JR
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mediatechnology
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Re: smokin....

Post by mediatechnology »

The closest store selling Orca Bay products are 132 miles from you JR.

http://www.orcabayseafoods.com/ at Rouses Market 40-8 in Ocean Springs http://orcabayseafoods.com/seafood-prod ... arket-40-8

We buy the Orca Bay Salmon and Tilapia.

Some of the Chinese farmed frozen Tilapia in the local market here is so bad it's treated with Carbon Monoxide to preserve color.
Yuck.

The wife and I ran out of the usual Albacore Tuna fish we use and I remembered that I had some "apocalyptic tuna" (Star-Kist with a 2017 expiry) stashed in the basement bunker.
It had bee so long since we had eaten "regular" grocery store "tuna" (which may not be tuna) it was inedible.
Had to throw it out - I was afraid it would even make the Raccoons sick.
Heck, in a few years or months I may be able to trade that stash of tuna for a gold bar or two.
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JR.
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Re: smokin....

Post by JR. »

Hard to believe but the three weeks since my last large batch of lunch servings is almost up. Coincidentally I just got back from the store with 4# of frozen salmon. I was using 3# of canned salmon (ugh) in my old recipe. Last time a few weeks ago I cooked up an almost 2# fillet. This time I purchased two of the 2# packages of smaller fish steaks.

I have been trying to make sense of the date codes on the packages. The 1.75# fillet package had a 4/2016 date printed on the package. Last week at a different store I found some frozen salmon with a 9/2017 date. Todays frozen salmon from walmart have a 11/2017 date. So the small frozen steaks are a lot newer than the larger fillet (still had 4/2016 packages in the store's freezer).

There is not a freeze by date for "frozen" fish, but I feel better about using 11/2017 date code than 4/2016, since we are almost at 8/2016. :oops:

The albumin oozing from my salmon the last time suggests that I smoked it too hot too fast so I will target a lower temps and ramp up to 140'. After I get a good smoke on it, I will shred it into the slow cooker to finish cooking.

This smoking is a lot of work, and eventually I will just cook the salmon in the slow cooker, but for now I haven't perfected the smoking process so next experiment coming up in a few days.

I will never go back to canned salmon (ewww smells fishy, and good fish should not smell like fish).

Frozen salmon is less than +6dB the cost and tastes +20 dB better. 8-)

JR
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Re: smokin....

Post by mediatechnology »

Check the product labels and avoid anything with Phosphates.
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