Alder-Smoked Sockeye Salmon

Low & slow smoking 12 recipes

• The smoke coming off is thin and blue, not white and rolling. White smoke is unburnt fuel and it deposits soot and acrid phenols; a fire drawing enough air to burn its own smoke is what perfumes rather than tars.
• The chamber held its temperature within a narrow band for the whole cook, adjusted with the air intake rather than by adding fuel in armfuls. A pit swinging fifty degrees cooks the outside twice and the middle once.
• The stall was expected and waited out or wrapped through deliberately, not chased with heat. A brisket that sits at 70C (158F) for three hours is losing exactly as much water as it needs to; the cook who turns the fire up renders it dry.
• Doneness was judged by feel and by probe, never by the clock: the probe slides in with no resistance anywhere, and the number that matters is the one where the collagen has gone, not a time per kilo.
• It rested long and warm, an hour or more, wrapped and out of any draught. Cut straight off the pit and the juice runs onto the board instead of staying in the slice.

Where it goes wrong The fire was fed for temperature rather than for combustion, so it smouldered: white smoke, a bitter deposit on the surface, and a swing in the chamber every time more fuel went on. Then the stall was read as a stall in progress rather than evaporation doing its work, the heat went up, and the meat finished dry with a hard grey band under the bark.

Brining & curing 88 recipes

• Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
• The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
• The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
• Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
• Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.

Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.