Title: Smoking Salmon and Trout Part Xv - Salting
Categories: Seafood Smoke Info
Yield: 1 Text file

Use only pure pickling salt as it has no impurities or additives to toughen or discolor fish. Mild salting still requires refrigeration; hard salting does not. Salted fish will require freshening before eating.

Mild Salting: Clean the fish and ice them if you can't salt right away. Fillet them. Cut the fillets into chunks according to thickness. Score the skin. Caseharden the fish by soaking in a cold deblooding bath of 65 deg sal brine [2 2/3 c salt to 100 oz water] for 1 hr. to stop fat fish from oozing oil. [press out any blood in this bath with your fingers.] Weigh fish and have ready 1 lb salt for every 10 lb fish.

To salt the fish, spread the required salt in a pan or tray. Lay each piece of fish, skin side down on the salt and scoop salt over it; don't rub it in- just cover it. Pick up the piece with as much salt as will adhere to it and place skin side down in the curing container. when a layer is completed sprinkle it lightly with salt and pack successive layers, skin side down until the top layer- pack it skin side up. Fill the packed container with saturated brine- 100 deg sal[ 4 1/2 cups salt per 100 oz water.] Weight the fish down to submerge completely in the brine. Cover. Store at 35 to 40 deg,-normal refrigerator temp and let cure two weeks. Will keep up to one year.

Hard Salting: Follow as above except increase salt to 2 1/2 lb per 10 lb fish. Will keep one year if kept in a cool place.

Extracted from: Smoking Salmon & Trout by Jack Whelan. Published by: Airie Publishing, Deep Bay, B.C. ISBN: 0-919807-00-3 Posted by: Jim Weller

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