First smoked fish on new grill

dubob

Member
Another first on my Camp Chef Woodwind SG pellet grill - smoked fish. Not smoking for immediate consumption at the dinner table, but rather the kind you can snack on over the next week or two. Like I used to do in my Bradley smoker and it took about 8 hours to do.

For this batch, I changed my process to follow one suggested by Camp Chef. I salt & peppered the trout fillets last night and added a layer of brown sugar. I covered with saran wrap and put them in the fridge overnight. Got up at O'Dark thirty this AM and fired up the grill to run at Lo Smoke (160F). I then took the fillets out of the fridge, un-wrapped them, and wiped them off with a paper towel to remove most of the salt, pepper, & sugar. The process called for putting them back into the fridge to let the pellicle form, but I skipped that step. I laid them out on a baking sheet and put them into the grill and inserted the IT probe into one of the thicker fillets.

I checked the IT every hour looking for that 140F reading and didn't find it until the time elapsed hit 4 hours. At this point, the IT read 141F. I pulled the baking sheet out and sampled the result. Not bad! Not as good as wet brining and smoking in my Bradley with a layer of brown sugar added to each filet as it went into the Bradley. But not bad.

The next batch of smoked fish will be wet brined instead of dry brined and I will put the brown sugar on when it goes into the grill. Life is good.


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TentHunter

Moderator
They sure do look good! I love smoked trout.

Next time, if you still think they could still use more smoke, then try cold-smoking them in your Camp Chef for a bit with something like the A-Maze-N pellet smoking tube: Tube Smoker | A-MAZE-N Smoker | Big Poppa Smoker, then do the hot-smoke at 160°-165°.

HOWEVER... If you do try cold-smoking, then you really need to add some cure #1 (4 tsp per gallon of brine) to your wet brine mix to be absolutely sure you prevent botulism.
 
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