Home-smoked fish can be cold or hot. The smoking process itself is accompanied by soaking the fish with smoke. Before you start smoking fish at home, you first need to understand the technology of the process, and only then make it yourself or purchase the necessary equipment.
Regardless of the method of smoking, it is advisable to process the fish (clean the entrails and cut the gills) and process it with salt. Salt treatment is quite an interesting process, since each person produces it according to his own recipe. Some people salt a kilogram of fish with one tablespoon of salt, others with 10 tablespoons, however, each to its taste.
In order to deal with the required amount of salt you need experience, tests and learn from your mistakes. However, no one forbids learning from the mistakes of others. Accumulations of salt under the scales of smoked fish serve as a sign of oversalt. In cases with oily fish, a sign of overshot is the destruction of its tissue, as well as a rusty color.
Properly smoked fish at home in a hot way should be in special ovens, where the temperature is + 50 ° C, for 30 minutes. Signs of the readiness of the fish is its golden color, it becomes friable. Exceeding the temperature regime leads to the destruction of fish (fat flows from it). The bitter taste and viscosity means that you haven’t finished or ruined the fish.
Cold smoking of fish at home is carried out for many hours, or even days. First of all, smoke is important here; high temperature is inappropriate. After completion of the smoking process, the fish should be hung in the shade for a couple of days.
In both methods, smoking of fish at home should, in accordance with measures for the disinfection of fish from various parasites. The traditional method of disinfection is the exposure of fish in saline for several days.
To smoke fish at home, you first need a stove. The design of the furnace is quite simple: gratings are placed on top, on which the fish lays or hangs. Non-resinous trees should be used for fire. After heating the oven, put the fish on the grill, put out the fire and close the chimney. To give the fish a specific taste, it is possible to pour sawdust of alder, wormwood or other grass on the coals. After that, the oven closes for the required time, and the fish is smoked until cooked.
Nowadays, portable tin boxes for smoking fish are more popular. Their design is very similar to that of stationary fish smoking stoves. They are distinguished by the fact that sawdust of various tree species is placed at the bottom and with the help of a burner or a bonfire sawdust begins to smolder. This begins the process of soaking the fish with smoke.
Hot-smoked fish at home can cause the fish to burn. Therefore, you should be careful about heating the stove or tin box. It is also necessary to control the humidity of the chamber, if necessary, open the lid of the furnace.
The cold process of smoking fish is lengthy: before putting the fish, sawdust is ignited and the stove is removed from the fire. After complete cooling, the stove is put on fire again, but not for a long time, so that the fish does not have time to bake. This process takes several days. With the cold method of smoking, it is best that the smoke does not linger in the smoking chamber, but rather goes outside. It is also desirable that the chamber where the sawdust is burned is separate from the smoking chamber. However, to become a true master in fish smoking, you need enough experience.