It’s been awhile since I’ve updated, but that’s mostly due to the unique challenge that this particular chapter provided.  As I stated in my last post, this post marks the first appearance of episodes from Season 4 of Good Eats, and this is the first time that Alton created his own cooking apparatus.  Commercial smokers are big, bulky and expensive – the cheapest one I was able to find with a bit of searching online was about fifty bucks, but it looked more like a grill than a smoker.  Alton’s smoker hack is far less than that.

But first, let’s talk about smoke.  I’m a big fan of the stuff, so long as it’s not meant to be inhaled.  There’s a satisfying flavor that can only be imparted to meats, vegetables and even salt that comes from burning hard woods at low temperatures.  There’s a magic that happens when you subject a tough piece of meat – pork ribs, for example – to hickory smoke for several hours.  Tough collagen turns into lip-smacking gelatin, to be sure, but the meat also picks up the flavor from the smoke as well.  You’re not just eating the pig any longer; you’re eating the essence of the smoke as well.  Smoking isn’t just cooking.  It’s alchemy.  But for as long as I’ve lived in barbeque country, as long as I’ve lived around the magic, I’d never attempted to practice the sorcery myself, leaving it in the capable hands of the professionals.  In this episode, though, Alton strips the process bare, removing the mystical trappings from smoked food and showing us that smoking food doesn’t require a fancy manufactured device.  After all, our ancestors didn’t have that, and they smoked food just fine.

So, yes, while I could have just smoked the salmon on a commercially available smoker, that really does go against the spirit of this exercise.  No, to truly do this chapter justice, I not only had to cook the salmon, but I would have to build my own smoker.

The build is pretty simple, which is good, because I have the craftiness of Inspector Clouseau.  The housing is a large cardboard box.  About halfway up, three long wooden dowels are placed through the long side of the box in regular intervals.  A metal rack sits on top of it to hold the target food.  The heat source is an electric hot plate.  A small cast iron skillet goes on top of that, which holds the wood chips.  A perforated pie plate goes on top of that, which prevents any fat dripping off the food from flaring up.  Two probe thermometers puncture the box – one goes inside the food to find out when it’s done, while the other hangs inside the box to tell the temperature inside.  That’s pretty much it.

Most of the time spent between the last post on this blog and this one were spent sourcing and purchasing the bits for this build.  The cardboard box was easy to find – U-Haul carries Extra Large boxes for about a dollar each.  Home Depot had the dowels I was looking for – three of them cost me about seven bucks.  My parents had a tiny cast iron skillet, and it worked perfectly, but if I had to buy one just for this, it probably would have been about twelve dollars.  I already owned one probe thermometer, so I purchased another one for about fifteen dollars.  The pie plate was left over from the trio I bought for the chocolate “pudding” pie in “Tofuworld,” so it was probably about a dollar as well.  The biggest expense, obviously, was going to be the hot plate.  Not a lot of places in town sold them, so when I found one new at a Wal-Mart, it was about twenty bucks.  I knew I could find one cheaper, so I kept looking through thrift stores to no avail.  Finally, the Wednesday before the day I’d scheduled to build this, I went to the one on my way home from work.  It had been a bear of a day, where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  I’d left a half hour early because I didn’t take a lunch, and I’d decided I was going to go have some barbeque – there are few problems in this world that can’t be solved by the consumption of smoked meat.  It was right next to one of the thrift shops I had frequented, so I walked in, still looking for the metal rack, and resigned to buy one from Wal-Mart after I was finished with lunch/dinner/meal.  As it happened, I came across a perfectly serviceable rack for about four dollars, so I scooped it up.  Just to complete my circuit, I went through the electronics shelves again, just to confirm that, once again, there wasn’t anything I needed.

And as I walked down that aisle, I laid eyes upon it.  A single burner hot plate with exposed coil.  Six dollars.  The choirs of angels that sang in exultation were included free of charge.  I grabbed it like a child snatching up a present at Christmas, scarcely believing it was truly here.  I plugged it into a wall socket, certain there was something wrong with it.  It heated quickly, and I swiftly unplugged it and purchased it.

Total cost: $60, if everything was purchased new.  My cost: $34.

Now, with the hack sorted, I could prepare the fish itself.  Shopping around, I found two Coho salmon filets at my local grocery store at the right weight, about a pound and a half each.  The process involves making a cure from dark brown sugar, regular white sugar, kosher salt, and crushed black peppercorns mixed together, and applying it to the fish in a very specific manner.  You lay down a long layer of aluminum foil, followed by equally long layers of plastic wrap.  A third of the cure is sprinkled on the plastic wrap, and one of the two filets is laid skin side down on the wrap.  A second third of the cure is sprinkled on the flesh of the fish, and patted down to coat.  The flesh side of the second filet is placed directly on top of the first filet, so that the meat from both is in direct contact with the cure.  The remaining cure is placed on top of the second filet’s skin.  The plastic wrap is wrapped around the two filets tightly, and the foil around that.  The fish is placed on a half sheet pan with a second on top of it, with a small weight on top of that, like a phone book, or a few bricks.  (I can report that Necromancer Games’ Tome of Horrors Complete for the Pathfinder RPG works quite well.)  You’ll press for twelve hours, flip the fish, and press for another twelve hours after that.  After a full day, some juice will have leaked out, and you’re ready to rinse the cure off the fish.  The salmon is patted dry, and left to air dry in a cool place.  I left it on my stovetop at ambient temperatures for a few hours.  This makes the surface dry and ready to accept the smoke.

At this point, I took everything over to one of my friend’s houses – the same place we made the lamb a few months earlier.  I had built the rig in my apartment a few nights earlier, mostly because I knew that I didn’t want to take the time building it then.  Reassembly took about five or ten minutes, but it didn’t take long to get going.  I had soaked the chips to ensure that I could make them last longer.  As a result, I only had to change the wood once in a two-and-a-half hour cooking time.

How was it?  Well, since I’d not had a lot of smoked salmon before I started looking into this recipe, I bought several brands from supermarkets.  This was better than any of them.  It was so good, it convinced one of my friends that says he doesn’t like fish that salmon was a good entry-level fish.  I brought one of the filets into work along with bagels and cream cheese – they were amazed to hear it came from a cardboard box.  The best part?  The initial cost of building the smoker is done.  Now I get to reap the rewards.  I’m pretty much obligated to smoke other stuff in that box now.  Anyone up for chicken?

Next Time: It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about, watching some good friend scream, “Let me out!”

Recipe:

Box-Smoked Salmon