|
|
Ephim Moonin’s Recipe on Smoke Fish As told to Gordon Norman |
||
|
Smokehouses
are places where people hang their fish and smoke dry’em and they got racks
on them where they could hang the fish on. The
purpose of a smokehouse is to dry the fish and give them a smoke flavor. The
kind of wood to make the smoke flavor is cotton wood. It
doesn’t matter, most people smoke king salmon, silvers and reds, it really doesn’t matter. Mostly salmon and a little bit of
halibut maybe. Your fish are cut in half leaving the back bone out and for
smoke fish the kind you put salt on you smoke them in brine. Dried fish you
just hang in there, you don’t have to put salt on them. You
dip it in the brine, okay. The way you make the brine is, first you put in so
many cups of salt in a bucket. It depends on the size of the bucket. You put
some water in it, and the way you can tell if the brine is right, you put a
potato floats, the brine is just right The
fish don’t have to be the same size, they can be big, small or however you
want them. Smoke
fish is called squaw candy. They can keep it for three weeks. It
depends on the size of a smokehouse. Like mine I got, I got a small one which
is a 6 by 6 foot smokehouse and it is ten feet tall. The most I put in there
is 40 reds. That’s quite a bit of fish. For
smoke salmon, you can cut them in strips of about half an inch wide or maybe
little more, and dried fish you don’t have to cut
them in strips. They’ll just dry and won’t have a smoky flavor. Best
time of the year really is before the flies come out, which is in May and
June, when the red salmon season is. In the fall silvers run. Kings come out
same time as reds do. When kings come out you have to take really good care
of them. When you’re smoking silvers be careful so
flies don’t lay eggs on them and so they don’t get maggots. The
way you can do it is put a vent in the smokehouse, put on some kind of a
screen so the flies can’t come through and keep the smoke going at all times
to keep the flies out. Some people I heard put a little bit of pepper on
their smoked salmon and that keeps flies away. If you see any eggs laying on the fish, you just scrap them off with a knife
and keep the eggs off of them.
Ephim Mooning and his smokehouse
|
|||
|
|
Copyright 1981, Volume 1 |
|
|
