Smoking Salmon and Brining Bait

What to do with the five pink salmon in my freezer? I dusted off my neglected wood pellet grill to hot smoke three of them. I brined them overnight and let them sit exposed in the fridge all day to form a pellicle. I ran into a lot of problems with my grill tonight though… The only way to get rid of the year-old cherry wood pellets was to turn the entire grill upside down to dump them out. I put in new alder pellets, but they wouldn’t easily light. It would smoke for a while, giving me the impression it was working, but then it would quit. I finally successfully lit it by hand, but later when I reduced the temperature it quit again and I couldn’t restart it. I think my alder pellets were crap, but I couldn’t exactly dump them out while the grill was hot. I finally decided that the salmon had gotten plenty of smoke (as did my eyes), and I finished it up in the oven to get it over 140 F. Despite the mishaps, It turned out pretty tasty, and I’m now up to speed again on smoking and on using my pellet grill.

Later on, I had a romantic bait night, just me and my herring. I always thought it would be the greatest insult in life to be killed not for food, but rather for bait to catch some better-tasting animal. These herring can’t hold a candle to coho, so they were sacrificed for the cause. They were all cut into small fillets and then into little strips, which can be cured overnight in rock salt and then attached to fish hooks. I can’t let Dave win again! These herring strips then turn leathery and tough, so that they stay on your hook for hours without falling off.

I throw all my extra fish (and chicken) parts into a Ziploc bag in my freezer. Someday I will either use it all for crab bait, or just throw the contents into the sea to return it to the ecosystem.

[Prologue January 2025] I had a lot of problems with my wood pellet grill, and finally learned that I had a stuck fan. When I knocked it with a pen, it started spinning, and then the smoker worked perfectly.