Hot smoking fish: a recipe for a tasty and aromatic dish

Good day, dear visitors! Smoked fish is a must-have dish on the holiday table for many. Many people like this appetizer, but today we will prepare a salad with hot smoked fish.

As usual, there are a large number of cooking options, so I decided not to stop at just one recipe and offer you several. They are all very simple, some with very minimal ingredients. And what is very important for many, there are several options for very quick preparation.

Salad with smoked fish, rice and egg

As you know, seafood goes very well with rice. That's why this salad turns out very tasty.

Prepare:

hot smoked mackerel - 1 piece;
boiled eggs - 4-5 pcs;
sweet or red onion - 1 small or half medium;
salt - add to taste (if necessary);
boiled rice - 1 cup;
mayonnaise - for dressing.

Remove the skin and bones from the mackerel. Cut or use your hands to separate into small pieces. Immediately transfer it to a salad bowl.

Cut the eggs into small pieces. Add to mackerel.

Next fig.

Also finely chop the onion.

Mix all the ingredients and put them in the refrigerator to cool.

For better storage of the salad, it is better not to season it all with mayonnaise at once. And add it portionwise to everyone’s plate.

Cooking recipes

For cooking low-fat foods, it is better to use hot smoking. The smoke temperature should be from 43 degrees. Fatty meats and fish are cold smoked when the smoke temperature is no higher than 25 degrees.

During smoking, the raw material is colored and the upper part is dried. Finished products should be refrigerated and left hanging for five days.

Smoked mackerel

The fish must be undamaged and whole. It needs to be gutted, rubbed with salt and spices and left for a day. Use alder wood chips for smoking. You need to place apple tree branches, raspberry and currant leaves on the chamber grill. Place fish carcasses on top. Mackerel cooks for 20 minutes.

https://youtu.be/G063xmCw0zI

Hot smoking chicken

First you need to marinate the chicken. Rinse the carcass, remove excess fat and dry with napkins. Make slits in the skin and push small cloves of garlic, cut lengthwise, into them. Mix salt and spices and rub the chicken inside and out with this mixture. Then wrap it in foil and put it in the refrigerator to marinate for a day.

After this, let it sit for two hours at room temperature. Remove the carcass from the foil, then tie the legs and wings together so that they do not stick out to the sides. Place the chicken in the smoker and cook for an hour.

Layered salad with smoked fish, potatoes and fresh cucumber

Not a single holiday is complete without puff salads. After all, they can be beautifully decorated at your discretion. And they turn out very tender and juicy.

Required ingredients:

salt - to taste;
hot smoked eel - 200 g;
salad mayonnaise - for layering;
boiled potatoes in their jackets - 2 pcs;
sprigs of dill - to taste;
boiled carrots - 1 piece;
fresh cucumber - 1 piece;
cheese - 150 gr;
hard-boiled eggs - 3 pcs.

Peel the eel and remove all the seeds. Cut into small pieces.

Chop the dill; a few sprigs can be left for decoration.

Next, grate the potatoes, cucumber, eggs, carrots and cheese separately onto a coarse grater. You can cut out flowers from several carrot slices for decoration. Squeeze the juice from the cucumbers by hand.

Then we will lay out the salad in layers, lightly adding salt to each one (except fish and cheese) and pouring a mesh of mayonnaise over it. 1st layer is eel.

The second is potatoes.

Then fresh cucumber and carrots.

Next - eggs.

The last layer is cheese. Place chopped dill around the edges. On top there are carrot flowers and sprigs of greenery.

We remove for a couple of hours to cool and so that all layers are saturated.

DIY fish smokehouse: manufacturing technology

There is no fundamental difference between hot and cold smoked smokehouses. The main difference is the distance from the hearth to the camera.

Regardless of the type of smoking, the smoking device necessarily includes a chamber, a tray for fat, hooks for hanging, and a hearth. To manufacture the structure, it is necessary to decide how much food will be smoked.

Cold smoked smokehouse for fish

For production you will need:

Smoking chamber. It is installed on bricks that are built into the ground, or on wooden blocks. Condensation may appear and the soil may move to the side.
Chips or sawdust used as fuel material. The firewood is placed in the center, and everything else is piled around it. This way the fire will not burn, but smoke, and the product will acquire a pleasant aroma.
It is necessary to ensure good draft from the fire to the chamber. To do this, install a long chimney so that the smoke has time to cool to the required temperature. Instead, you can make fans and distributors.

The structure itself is made from a metal or wooden barrel. A chimney is mounted between the barrel and the firebox - a trench dug in the ground, up to two meters long, reinforced with slate or iron and covered with earth. The barrel must be placed on a sheet of iron with holes so that smoke from the trench gets inside.

There is another option when a barrel is installed on the stove. You need to light a fireplace in the stove and smoke the fish in a barrel. The smoking temperature should be 40 degrees. Smoking under such conditions can last up to several days.

Hot smoking device

The difference between this device and a cold smoked smokehouse is that the temperature in the chamber should be from 60 to 100 degrees. No need for a cooling duct.

The design is prepared in a few minutes. To do this, you need to take an enamel bucket or pan and place wood chips on the bottom. Divide the container in half according to height and install a wire rack.

The fish is cooked in such a smokehouse for about an hour. The temperature settles at about 70 degrees, and then rises to a hundred.

Making Tips:

First you need to choose a suitable place. It is advisable to install the device away from residential buildings.
For the solution, it is best to take sand and clay.
The fish can be wrapped in gauze, then all the soot remains on it. Both gutted and whole carcasses are smoked. When gutting, the belly is stuffed with herbs. This improves the taste.
All fruit trees can be used. Fresh herbs can be added to the smoker as needed to create a thick smoke. And after 3 hours, remove the fish and ventilate. Do not use coniferous branches.
The chamber must have a fat tray.

Smokehouse from a gas cylinder

For production you need a gas cylinder with a capacity of 50 liters. Before use, you need to release all the gas from the cylinder, check for its absence by treating the hole with a soap solution. Then rinse with water and cut off the top of the cylinder, and then attach the legs to it. The structure must be stable. At the end, a firebox and chimney are installed, which are made of metal.

The gas cylinder should not be very old or rusty. It must be heated before use.

The disadvantage is that the cylinder will smell unpleasant for a long time, therefore smoked products will smell too.

Brick smokehouse

Make a trench in the ground that will serve as a chimney. Place the firebox at the beginning, and the smoking chamber at the end (height no more than 150 cm). Lay out everything only with red brick. The laying is done on edge. A clay solution should be used.

Another smokehouse is made from a bucket. Products are cooked in it for about an hour. But a device made from a barrel will allow you to smoke more raw materials than a bucket. Even an old refrigerator can be used as a smoking apparatus.

The simplest recipe for salad with hot smoked fish

This is a great option when you really don’t have enough time, but you need to quickly prepare a delicious salad. The ingredients here are the bare minimum and the recipe itself couldn’t be simpler.

Prepare foods:

mayonnaise - 250 gr;
potatoes - 600 gr;
medium-sized onion - 1 piece;
cod or sea bass (hot smoked) - 450 gr.

Boil the potatoes until tender. We separate the fish into small pieces with our hands.

Cut the peeled onion into small cubes, place in a sieve and pour over boiling water.

After cooling, add to the perch.

Mash the boiled potatoes with a potato masher.

Mix all ingredients, seasoning with mayonnaise.

If desired, you can also sprinkle chopped herbs on top of the salad.

How to cook hot and cold smoked fish

After catching fish, some fishermen got used to smoking their catch at home. And especially experienced hunters prepare fish in this way right at the reservoir, without waiting for them to arrive home.

There are two types of smoking, hot and cold. The first type is simpler and has many ways to do it. Let's look at some of them. To smoke fish, you can use special smokehouses for hot smoking, which are sold in stores or craftsmen make them themselves. The smokehouse is a rectangular metal box made of stainless steel or iron (not galvanized). Sizes vary. For stationary use it can be larger, but for universal use the dimensions are usually small. Small-capacity smokehouses are made in different designs, including collapsible ones, which can be easily transported. In general, the design of a metal box should have a lid that can be either removed or opened. Also inside the smokehouse there should be a grate located at a distance of 8-5 cm from the bottom. Some people use a stainless steel bucket as a smokehouse, which is also equipped with a grate and a lid.

Before the fish is smoked, it is cleaned and gutted, then washed and rubbed with salt. The fish is infused in salt for 3-2 hours, after which it can be dried a little in the breeze, covered with gauze to prevent flies.

Read: Recipe for loach

For smoking you will need sawdust or small twigs. But not all tree species are suitable for this. Wood that produces resin is not suitable for smoking. Therefore, alder sawdust, which is poured onto the bottom of the smokehouse, would be suitable. You can add a juniper branch to them, without needles, to give the fish a golden color. For a fragrant smell, you can put a bay leaf in the sawdust.

The fish themselves are placed on the grill so that they do not touch each other, and different spices can be placed inside the fish if desired. The smokehouse box is closed and the smokehouse itself is placed on a fire or primus fire. In this state, the fish is cooked within 25-15 minutes, everything will depend on the size of the fish. If, after the expiration of the period, you remove the lid and find that the fish is not yet ready, then the box is closed again and the fish simmers on the fire for some more time until it is fully cooked.

Hot smoked fish is prepared without the help of a metal smokehouse. This can be done directly while fishing. To do this, a suitable cliff is looked for on the shore of the reservoir and a niche is dug in it with a height of 70 cm, a width of 70 cm, and a length of 70 cm. These dimensions are minimal. The fish are placed in a niche on sticks fixed in the ceiling of the pit. You can also hang it by first wrapping it with rope so that the fish does not fall apart during the smoking process. At the bottom of the niche, twigs of alder, aspen, and wet foliage are placed for the fire. During smoking, this material will produce not so much fire as hot smoke, in which our fish will be smoked. Depending on the size of the fish, the cooking time will also vary. But within 3-1 hours it will be ready. During the smoking process, fish should be turned over to ensure even cooking.

Read: Hake in lecho sauce

The next method of smoking fish directly on a pond is one of the simplest, if not the simplest. To do this, having prepared the fish, we put it on sticks (wood that does not contain resin) and stick them on the leeward side of the fire so that hot smoke flows towards them. Cooked smoked fish acquires a golden-bronze hue and a specific smell that even the most sophisticated gourmet cannot resist. When preparing fish using the open smoking method, it is worth remembering that in this case the scales are not removed from the fish before cooking.

The next type of smoking fish is much more difficult than hot cooking. This is cold smoking. The result of cold smoking is a tasty balyk that does not spoil for a long time, although the time required is significant compared to hot smoking. In order to make a cold smoked product, you need to gut the catch, salt it and after two days hang it out for airing. The smokehouse itself for cold smoking of products is a hut or canopy surrounded by turf. Fish prepared for smoking is hung in this structure. It is heated with dry sawdust or rotten alder or aspen wood. If desired, you can add fragrant herbs or juniper branches without needles. There should always be thick smoke in the hut, but not hot, but colder when compared to hot smoking. Its temperature can be forty degrees Celsius or lower. The fish is cold smoked for two days, without interruption. After cooking, the fish is cooled and placed in a container with access to oxygen. You can set up a smokehouse on a steep bank and smoke caught trophies right while fishing. The most delicious are salmon fish, as well as pike perch, asp and many others.

Read: Trout in orange sauce

Delicious recipe for salad with smoked fish

This option in its composition is very similar to the well-known “Olivier”, but its taste is naturally completely different. Once you try it at least once, it will certainly become one of your favorites. It’s not for nothing that this recipe is considered one of the most delicious.

Prepare:

boiled potatoes - 5 pcs;
hot smoked red fish (cleaned and divided into pieces) 300-400 g;
onion - 1 piece;
boiled carrots - 2 pcs;
pickled cucumbers - 5 pcs;
boiled eggs - 5 pcs;
dill greens - to taste;
mayonnaise - for dressing;
salt - to taste;
canned green peas - 1 can.

Cut the pickled cucumbers into cubes.

Add fish and diced carrots to them.

Then potatoes cut in the same way.

Next, chop the onion and dill and cut the eggs into cubes (you can leave one for decoration). Add everything to the salad, along with canned peas (without liquid) and mix, adding salt to taste.

Season with mayonnaise, sprinkle with finely grated egg and herbs on top.

How to smoke fish in a smokehouse

An important aspect when preparing smoked fish is the choice of type. Fatty varieties of river and sea fish will be suitable for preparing in this way:

salmon (trout, salmon);
sturgeon;
mackerel;
tuna;
perch;
carp;
zander;
tench.

To prepare a delicious dish, you need to properly prepare the carcasses:

Be sure to rinse the fish to remove all dirt and foreign odors. If the fish are large, clean them by removing the insides and head. Small fish do not need to be processed in this way.
Salting fish is allowed in 2 methods: wet and dry. The first salting option involves preparing a water-salt marinade, the second involves rubbing coarse salt on each carcass. It is not recommended to marinate with iodized seasoning - a specific, unpleasant taste and aroma may appear.
Before sending it inside the device, you should dry the fish a little by hanging it on hooks.

There are a few important tips you need to know to create a good tasting smoked fish:

Do not use sawdust from coniferous trees for cooking to avoid bitterness.
Try to choose carcasses of a similar size, place them loosely so that the fish do not touch.
Make sure that oxygen does not penetrate into the device.
Take special care when preparing eel. The blood of this variety is very poisonous, so it takes a little longer to cook.
Place water near homemade or purchased equipment to ensure safety in case of fire.

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How long does it take to smoke fish?

There are different types of smoking:

Hot involves manufacturing the product at a temperature above 70 degrees. It is important how long to smoke fish in a hot smoker. The fish pulp is ready in 40-50 minutes.
Cold involves heating to 28-50 degrees. Fish can take 2 or more days to prepare. But such a product will be stored for a long time.

Layered salad with smoked salmon and tomatoes

Another very simple recipe that is perfect for the holiday table. If you have the right ingredients, of which there are very few, it cooks quite quickly.