What you should know about hot smoking

The TomPress editorial by Philippe.


Smoking meat or fish is easy. A good product, a little preparation, a few embers and a little sawdust: you can begin!
If you are tempted by the idea of smoking, then it´s time to start. This is what you need to know to begin…

Before getting into the details, I feel that it is important to understand what we are looking for when we decide to smoke food. First of all, ask yourself whether you want to cook it or not. That is the first question and the answer will determine the rest.


Hot smoking, cold smoking: the wrong question!

When you cold smoke, the flesh remains uncooked.
When you hot smoke, you smoke and cook at the same time.

The wildest information abounds on the subject of hot smoking, but if you consider hot smoking from the point of view of cooking, you will have solved a major part of the problem. Consider your smokehouse to be a small oven. Compared to your domestic oven, the temperature will not be very high, but as you will be leaving your food to cook for much longer, the heat will have time to penetrate to the heart.

To give you an idea:
From 40°C (104° F), the food starts to cook.
At 45°C (113° F), you get pink fish.
Above 50°C (122° F), your fish is medium rare, or even well-cooked and beef will be rare.
At 55°C (131° F), your red meat will be medium rare.
At 60°C (140° F) or higher, it will be well cooked.
At 65°C (149° F), your poultry is cooked.

As you can see, these temperatures are quite low, and you do not need to have a very hot smokehouse. Time is your ally.

For example, a trout that you leave for 30 minutes in a smokehouse at 65°C (149° F) will have reached at least 50° at its heart, but that is not the point.
In the beginning, there is no point in worrying about things to the nearest degree. What counts is to know how to dissociate smoking from cooking. Is your trout undercooked? Turn it over in the pan or on a plancha plate, or better still, finish cooking it on the barbecue! This will add some great taste.

It is not essential to handle cooking and smoking at the same time.
You can even smoke the food before cooking it. Put your fresh sausages in the smokehouse for 30 minutes before putting them in the pan or grilling them. It will be a feast!
You can also smoke cooked foods. A big piece of ham can be smoked, as can a roast chicken.

My recipe :

Half-cooked smoked salmon
Purchase a salmon fillet with the skin and carefully remove the bones. Leave it in salt and then rinse it as though you are going to cold smoke it, then cut it into individual portions.
Prepare a large quantity of oak embers and half fill the drawer of your smokehouse. The embers should be glowing.
Put the slices on the grills with the skin facing down and cover part of the embers with sawdust. Leave the salmon to smoke.
You can stick to or slightly decrease the smoking time** for cold salmon.

Tips :

When you put your hand on the smokehouse, it should be hot but not excessively so.
If you cannot manage to get the temperature in your smokehouse to rise above tepid, put some extra embers beside the drawer.
Do not put your salmon too close to the embers as it will cook from below.
At the end of the smoking time, the salmon will have a more pronounced golden hue than after cold smoking. When you push the flesh open slightly, the top will be white but the centre will be translucent.

Something went wrong?
At worst, you will not get exactly what you wanted. It’s not serious and you won’t be wasting a nice piece of salmon.
- Not hot enough: you get a delicious smoked salmon.
- Too hot: it is not a mi-cuit, but it’s still great. Reheat it and enjoy it with potatoes and white sauce.
Vacuum seal the rest once you have removed the skin with a spoon and freeze. You will always have something to go with your tagliatelli, lasagnes, puff pastries…

** Average smoking time for salmon:

- for a 500 g fillet, count 1 hour of salting, no need to desalt, rinse in cold water, smoking time: around 90 minutes.

- for a 1 kg fillet, count 2 hours of salting, no need to desalt, rinse with cold water, smoking time: around 2 ½ hours.

- for a 2.5 kg fillet, count 5 hours of salting, rinse and desalt: 1 hour as for cod, smoking time: around 4 hours.

- for a 3 kg fillet, count 5 hours of salting, rinse and desalt for 90 minutes as for cod, smoking time: a minimum of 4 hours.