Salmon

There hasn't been so much smoke around my house since I quit a four pack-a-day habit, many years and another lifetime ago. The smoke these days is more benign — billows of hardwood smoke wreathing out of the ancient (and politically incorrect) Little Chief smoker out back, catching in my hair and filling my senses with the deep woodsy essence of a campfire on a cool fall afternoon.

The Little Chief has been busy. In the last couple of weeks, we have turned out loads of succulent salmon, as well as mellow cheese, tender brisket, and crunchy almonds, all perfumed with the heady tanginess of hickory smoke. Like my former smoking habit, this one is addictive. I could eat smoked salmon every single day.

I did just that this summer at a family reunion on the Oregon coast. U.S. 101, the twisting highway that tracks above the frothing waves of the Pacific Ocean, is the place to go for roadside shops that sell locally caught, home-smoked fish. Salty and a little sweet against the pungent backdrop of the smoke, the fish is delicious flaked into a savory spread or a steaming chowder, or simply eaten by itself on a slice of buttered bread.

At this year's reunion my brother-in-law decided to do the smoking himself, producing fragrant pink salmon fillets and mahogany colored slabs of cheese. Absolutely fantastic. We ate ourselves silly and came back to Bloomington inspired to dig our decrepit smoker out of the garage.

A leftover from my husband's days in south Florida where a good day's fishing was followed by a long night of smoking mackerel, swordfish and mullet, the smoker had been dragged by us from house to house during our several moves in Bloomington. We used it only once, to produce an undercooked and unappetizing smoked goose one Thanksgiving, and promptly banished it back to the garage.

We've had better luck this time around, perhaps because fish is easier to smoke, and perhaps because we bothered to do a little research beforehand.

Traditionally, the whole point of smoking was to preserve food. In pre-refrigeration days, meat would spoil quickly as bacteria, yeast, and other organisms began to break it down. The smoking process put paid to that in two ways — it began with a curing or brining stage that infused the fish or meats with salt which halts bacterial action, and then the smoke itself would continue the work, partly through the chemicals in the smoke and partly by drying out the food. Really dry food (think beef jerky) doesn't go bad for years.

Today we do have refrigerators, of course, but we also know that smoking does much more to food than merely preserve it. As anyone who has ever crunched a perfectly cooked strip of really good bacon knows, smoking can take ordinary food to exquisite heights.

Food can be cold or hot smoked. Cold smoking is beyond the reach or patience of most home cooks — it takes place at temperatures roughly between 60-110 degrees, requires a longer brining time and a much longer smoking time (up to a week, in some cases). A special kind of cold smoking produces lox, the silky, lightly smoked salmon that is so great on bagels with cream cheese. Some kinds of cold smoked foods (certain hams, for instance) require conventional cooking before they can be eaten as the temperatures are too low to kill all the organisms that lurk in the meat.

Hot smoking is quicker and easier: the brining period is shorter and since the smoke can get to 180 degrees, the food cooks much faster. Hot smoking can be done in a smoker or on a charcoal or gas grill. t is hard to keep the temperature low when smoking on a grill, so frequently that version of hot smoking reaches 250 degrees. Since the smoky flavor comes from the length of time the food spends in the smoke, the goal is to cook it as slowly as possible with the equipment you have.

We hot smoked salmon in the smoker and on the grill. Both were grand, though to my mind the smoker yielded the moister and smokier fish. We used a simple brine with a brown sugar glaze and it was sweet and tangy. We smoked it for a long time (6 hours produced the best result), but at so low a temperature that the cooked fish was meltingly soft. This is the smoked salmon of my dreams. One batch cooked longer and hotter and consequently came out drier and flakier. We made that into a great salmon pate, with cream cheese, lemon juice, chopped scallions, and lots of parsley and dill. The fish was also good on crackers, with capers and chopped red onion.

Although salmon smoking was my priority, we did manage to try some other things in the smoker. Cheese was the easiest and really delicious. Technically cheese should be cold smoked, since at higher temperatures it will melt and separate. Monterey jack is a good candidate for hot smoking, however, because although it will melt the fat does not separate out. We tried it in both the smoker and the grill, and noticed no difference. We cut it into two inch thick slabs, put it in a glass oven-proof baking dish, and smoked it just until it melted and turned orange on top. I like it just lightly smoked, but you can leave it in longer if you prefer.

Also, although I hesitate to bring this up, as part of our grand smoking experiment we have been playing around with beef brisket smoking.

The results have been great. But, of course, dry cured, basted, slow cooked brisket is a mainstay of Texas barbecue, and as everyone knows, people have very, very strong views on just what barbecue is all about. I'm not foolish enough to touch this one in a closing paragraph — it's a whole other column. Stay tuned.

Christine would love to here from you about food or your favorite dining experience. E-mail her at cbarbour@heraldt.com. Next week, Food Fare partner Jennifer Piurek visits with Jigme Norbu and his new Bazaar Cafe.