Smoking

There are two kinds of smoking: hot-smoking and cold-smoking. When you hot-smoke salmon, you smoke and cook it at the same time. You can hot-smoke in one of two ways. For either method you should first cure the salmon in brine. If you’re smoking salmon to be served right away—a delicious way to cook salmon—it only needs 2 hours in brine and should be smoked just long enough to cook it through without drying it out. You should serve it while it’s still hot. The second method, used for preserving the salmon and then serving it cold, requires a longer curing in brine—up to 24 hours—and then a longer and hotter smoking, to an internal temperature of 180° F. Because this second method always causes the salmon to dry out—especially if you’re using Pacific salmon, which is leaner than Atlantic salmon—I never do it.