Traeger Smoked Salmon

A friend gave me 4 lbs of this super thick, fresh-caught King Salmon. I hot smoked it on my Traeger and it turned out awesome. This is how I did it…..

First, brine the salmon.

I used the brine and recipe from Hank Shaw’s Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook blog. This is an awesome blog that I highly recommend and this link will take you to a detailed how-to on smoked salmon.

I brined these pieces for 14 hours which was perfect for eating it hot. It could have gone for a full 24 hours which would have been a little better for eating it cold. Food tastes less salty when it is eaten cold. Thinner pieces of fish need only around 5-8 hours of brine time.

Form the pellicle.

This is an important step in smoking any kind of meat. Most people skip over it (and even I do sometimes) but it really does make a huge difference in the quality of the finished product. With fish this nice, I wasn’t going to take any shortcuts.

After removing the salmon from the brine, I patted it dry and left it in the refrigerator uncovered for a full day. The surface becomes tacky to the touch when the pellicle is formed. This allows more smoke flavor to stick to the meat.

Because this fish was so thick, I cut about a 1/2 inch into it to increase surface area for smoke and the glaze and to make it easier (and prettier) to cut portions of it after smoking it. If you try to cut fish after it is smoked it will have jabbed edges and the flakes will separate.

Smoke It

There are two kinds of Smoked Salmon. This is a hot-smoked salmon. The salmon is fully cooked. You can eat it hot or cold. It is delicious on its own or in salads, in pasta, and on a bagel. Then there is cold-smoked salmon. If you buy this, it comes pre-sliced in flat packages. This is a salt-cured product and has a raw-er consistency because it is raw. Cold-smoked salmon makes excellent canapés and is delicious on bagels or open-faced rye bread sandwiches.

To hot-smoke salmon: turn on the Traeger, set it on the lowest heat setting “Smoke”. Leave the lid open while it preheats and starts to smoke. After about 5 minutes, close the lid and put the fish on it. Ideally, fish would be smoked at about 140-160 F degrees. It was a hot sunny day and my Traeger bounced between 170 and 200 F. When it crept up to around 200 F I opened the lid to drop the heat down some. I timed this with glazing it.

If salmon is cooked at too high a temperature it will weep a white liquid that will become a white solid on the fish. It’s called albumin and it is essentially coagulated protein. Though harmless, it’s unattractive and makes the fish drier than it should be. You can brush a lot of it off when glazing it, but it’s better just to cook the salmon at a lower temp to begin with and keep all that moisture in the fish.

I smoked this Salmon for 2 hours, then started brushing it with maple syrup every 30 minutes for the last 1 hour to an hour and a half.

Once the fish felt firm to the touch I pulled it from the smoker and let it rest while I made the rest of dinner. I wanted the glaze to be a little bit more set which takes either higher temperatures or longer time so I popped it in the oven at 400 for just a couple of minutes right before serving it.

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Enjoy it!

Half of this salmon I ate hot that night for dinner. I threw the other half in a cooler and took it on a 2-day road trip to Montana with the family. We mixed it with Pesto Pasta for lunch and ate it with bagels and cream cheese for breakfast. So delicious!