Mankind made a big leap forward when they invented ways of preserving food. Smoking is one way to preserve food. Thus, you can save production right in the field, having at hand a minimum of auxiliary equipment and supplies. There are two ways of smoking: cold and hot.
Pick your recipe
You will need
-
- fish;
- coarse salt;
- hardwood wood.
Instruction manual
1
Prepare the fish: gut it, rinse thoroughly and put it in a bowl, pouring salt at the rate of 1.5 kg of salt per 10 kg of product. You can add a little sugar to the salt, this will improve the taste of the finished product. Add your favorite spices: pepper, aromatic herbs. Cover the fish with a flat dish, squeeze something heavy and leave in brine for 3-5 days, depending on the size of the fish.
2
Remove the fish from the brine and rinse: shallow in running water for 1-2 hours, and large can be soaked for up to a day. Then the fish need to be dried up: collect small pieces on a twine of 5-6 pieces, stringing them through the eyes. It’s better to tie a large one by the tail and hang it head down. Remove the fish to dry in the open air. Make sure that the fish is weathered from all sides, if necessary, insert wooden struts in the abdomen, so that everything inside is also dried.
3
After 2-3 days, hang dried and dried fish in the smokehouse and start smoking: the coals should smolder and smoke, avoid an open flame. Make sure that the smoking temperature remains within 25 degrees, otherwise it will turn out to be a hot method. The smoking process is very delicate, it is almost impossible to get the same results, even if you really want to. The taste of the final product depends on smoke formation, and that, in turn, depends on wood, weather and many other factors. Smoking is a process that requires constant attention, because you need to maintain the heat in the coals around the clock.
4
For smoking, take hardwood, conifers are not suitable for smoking, it contains too many tarry substances, as a result, the products become bitter. Birch is suitable for smoking, but bark must be removed from it, otherwise the tar contained in it settles on the product. Southerners try to use firewood from fruit trees for smoking products: they enrich the taste of smoked meats with their aromas. That is why by the end of smoking it is recommended to add tree branches with fragrant wood or spicy grass to the coals. For example, juniper smoke has disinfecting properties and has a wonderful aroma.
note
The shelf life of uncooked cold-smoked fish is much shorter, so for long-term storage you need to gut it.
Useful advice
For cold smoking, it is better to take fish of fatty varieties: in the process of long smoking, the product is dehydrated. Fatty fish retain their juiciness just due to their fat.