Moist, Flaky Hot Smoked Salmon on the Offset Smoker

by Eat More Vegans - Carnivore BBQ

Featured today is pure culinary excellence. If you're thing is seafood, meet the Ora King Salmon. Weighing an average of 40lbs, this salmon's rich, clean flavor is the best salmon money can buy.

Guiding us through the smoking process of this exquisite fish is Al from Eat More Vegans. Enjoy!

This is ora king salmon from New Zealand and it is gonna be the best tasting and best looking king salmon that you can get worldwide.

I actually bought this from Meat N' Bone... This isn't a sponsored video by Meat N’ Bone. If you wonder how much I love the folks that I choose to recommend to you, I paid the same price that you would pay for this...

So for our hot smoked salmon that we're gonna be making today, we're gonna start by making a brine. So we're gonna start with four cups of distilled water, and of course, a brine wouldn't be a brine without the key ingredient of salt. So we're going to put a half a cup of Morton's Kosher salt into our brine.

Now hot smoked salmon should have a sweet flavor profile, so I use brown sugar, but of course, I'm on keto so I use this Lakanto Monk Fruit golden sweetener… you just swap out the same measurements. So for me it's going to be a half a cup of this, and then, the last ingredient that's going to go into our brine is maple syrup.

Again, I'm keto. Can't have regular maple syrup but Lakanto luckily makes this keto friendly sugar-free maple syrup. You're gonna put a cup in. This is a 13 fluid ounce bottle, so we're gonna put about two-thirds of this, and then, we just hit it with our handy-dandy whisk.

Mix all those ingredients together. The salt and sugar will dissolve just fine, and of course, the maple syrup already has.

Okay, the knife we're going to be using for this is actually a new knife. You haven't seen this one on the show before, and you probably haven't seen this depending on where you're watching from. This is called an ulu knife, and this is a traditional Alaskan knife. Now, I know this isn’t an Alaskan salmon; this is a New Zealand salmon.

It's a great curved knife, and they use it as a utility knife. And this is Dalstrong's shogun series. Right, so I'm going to use this to cut the salmon into fillets.

So let's go ahead and put these fillets into a glass dish. That's gonna be our brining dish. Okay, now we're just gonna take this brine that we made, and we're gonna pour it over the salmon.

There we go. You see how they're floating in there now, and I’m gonna add a little bit of bright flavor here. If you've never cooked with lemon zest, it's amazing. It has this amazing citrusy, sweet flavor without the acidity of the lemon juice, which of course we don't want when we're brining fish.

That acidity will end up cooking the fish like it's ceviche, so we're just gonna zest one lemon and make sure that you're only getting the yellow part... that you're not getting any of the white underneath.

Okay, and then, finally for just a little bit more flavor, we're just gonna lay some dill into the brine here, and let some of that flavor come out and get absorbed by the salmon. So I'm gonna throw these lemons in a bag and put them in the refrigerator with the salmon. I'm gonna cover it in saran wrap leave it in the refrigerator for eight hours, and then, I'll be back and show you the next step.

Well it's been about eight hours in the brine, and now, it's time for the next stage. I want you to look at this, and I want to show you how different it looks just after eight hours in the brine.

Look how pronounced the fat is. How it's really popping now, right? This is absorbed. All of this flavor that we have. It's just going to be so good, but we can't put it on the smoker just yet.

We could dry it off and smoke it if we wanted to, but the smoke's not going to stick to it. So what we do is we dry it out and form a pellicle. It's going to be like a tacky, sticky surface. I'm just gonna put it right here on this rack. If you've been here before you've seen these racks because whenever I make steaks or chops this is what I use to dry brine the meat…

We're gonna just lay these out and the reason that we put them on a rack that sits above the tray like this is so the air can get underneath. See this is salmon that doesn't have the skin on. When you get it from Meat N’ Bone, it comes this way. And so we want to form that pellicle all the way around, so I'm putting it on the rack here so that a nice cool refrigerated air circulates…

Welcome to the backyard. This is Boba Fett. He's a Yoder Durango offset smoker with a horizontal main chamber and this vertical stack chamber.

Now in the main chamber, he's running at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. He's cooking brisket for another video…

Now on Boba, the vertical chamber runs at about 75 degrees cooler, so it's at 165 degrees; perfect for hot smoked salmon.

Now, I'll move the salmon over onto this mesh grill mat from Grillaholics. I didn't like grill mats before I found this one because the smoke can't get through them, but this one's a nonstick mesh so it's perfect for this. All right, let's get the salmon onto the smoker mesh mat and all for an hour or so. Until the fillets reach an internal temperature of 140 or 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

While they smoke, let's throw together a little dill aioli to amp up our salmon when it's time to taste.

So I'll start by juicing those two lemons that we zested yesterday. Then, add in two tablespoons of crushed garlic. Another two tablespoons of chopped fresh dill and about a cup of your favorite mayonnaise. Mine of course is Kewpie mayonnaise. If you have a different favorite then you're wrong, but you can use it.

Now, mix it all together, and pour it into a squeeze bottle. You can refrigerate until it's time.