Completed my first smoke on the SI #2 today. I'll call it a partial success, as it is the best texture of any smoked salmon I've ever made, but it was lacking smoke flavor - we'll get to that part later.
Here is the brine:
2 cups hot water
3 Tbsp kosher salt
½ cup brown sugar
⅓ cup soy sauce
1 Tbsp garlic powder
2 Tbsp pickling spices
Mix above until dissolved, add 2 cups ice cubes to cool
Basically we made the above brine, then removed the pin bones from 3 packs (about 3 sockeye filets) of sockeye, cut into 2-3 inch sections, and then placed the fish into the brine in the fridge. I use a small cooler for my brine bucket, so far it's worked for everything from fish filets to wild boar hams.
About 18hrs later I removed the fish from the brine, rinsed thoroughly, cut off the fat (afterthought, which I'll be doing before the brine from now on, it gets tough and rubbery which detracts from the quality of the meat itself), re-rinsed, patted dry, then let sit in the sun for a bit over an hour to form the pellicle. I also added fresh ground pepper medley on top of the fish prior to placing in the smoker.
I preheated my SI #2 with the door open until smoke was heavy, then I closed the door and let the Auber take control set to 140. For about 30 min I got good smoke but the heat from the chips alone brought the temp up over 150 (the Auber was off the whole time, it knew the temp spike was coming) so I cracked the door for a minute to bleed off some heat. From there I let it continue to self-manage at the 140 setting, which eventually meant good temp hold but no smoke. After an hour I bumped the temp up to 145 which got the element and chips hot enough to smoke again, not heavy, but enough to see.
After two hours I checked the firmness and everything was done. The texture is honestly pretty amazing. You can't pick up a whole piece because it flakes and breaks apart, but it is still dripping juicy and fantastically tender. The thinner pieces took on a bit more salt flavor than I'd like, but the thicker are about right - all of them are a bit short on pepper so I'll probably add some ground pepper to the brine next time, and maybe back off on the salt a little.
The main part that I'm disappointed with is the lack of smoke flavor. The SI #2 simply does too good of a job of retaining heat for the elements and chips to stay hot enough to produce smoke at 140 degrees. Towards the end of the smoke I put a small box fan under the smoker to move extra air, but I think it was too little too late.
Next time I'm not going to pre-heat, but will program stepped temps times in so that it slowly increases the temperature and hopefully keeps the chips hot enough to continue smoking. Being it only took 2hrs total for the fish, I think I'll start at 125 and bump up 5 degrees every 30 min, ending at 140 for 30 min.
EDIT: I just found out about the cold smoke plate, I'll be adding that with a tray of ice chips next time to see if that keeps temps down and smoke production up.
Here is a pic of a portion of the final product, we had already eaten a few pieces. There was a little bit of fat boil during the one temp spike, but it only affected a couple pieces, and the fat is easy to scrape off leaving behind pristine meat.
