Smoked Trout

Like I was saying in a previous post, I brought some fish home from Rushing Waters Fisheries in Wisconsin. I was ready to try my hand at smoking some fish. Since I had never smoked fish before I consulted The Easy Art of Smoking Food, by Chris Dubbs and Dave Heberle. The book suggests curing fish such as trout for five to eight hours before smoking.

For the salt mixture I used the proportions from my Gravlax recipe, about 3 grams of salt and 5 grams of sugar for each 100 grams of weight. So I applied the cure, put it in the fridge and took the boys to the Museum of Science and Industry.

When we got back, we fired up the cold smoker. The cold smoker consists of my Weber Bullet, an electric burner from K-mart, and a stainless steel bowl in which heated hickory sawdust smolders.

However on this day instead of saw dust, I used the branches from a basil plant I had saved from the garden. I got the idea from The Herbfarm Cookbook, by Jerry Traunfeld, it's at the library go check it out.

I chopped the shrub into bits. By the handful, the basil burned for about an hour. Due to the cold outside temp, the smoker stayed around 100F. The basil had a light sweet smoke, an hour was all the smoke I wanted, so I took the fish inside.

I brushed them with a little canola oil then finished them to firm and flaky in a 250F oven, about 30 minutes.

Holy smokes is it good. Bonne Femme ate a whole filet during the taste test. The skin is very good too. Mix it up with some crème fraîche and some herbs or make rillettes and you got yourself a smoky canapé. But like I said most of this fish didn't even make it to the toast. To Conclude: You don't need to live near a fancy pants deli to live the high life, just fresh ingredients and something in your yard that can burn.

Cheers.