Smoked Sockeye vs. Smoked Coho: Which one tastes better?

The end result of all the hard work of fishing is that moment when you finally put that tasty bite of seafood into your mouth. Cooking the fish is as important as catching it; a prize fish deserves thoughtful preparation. Smoking is one of the essential skills that every Northwest fisherman should know. I’ve tried a lot of different kinds of smoked salmon, but never side by side. I’ve always wanted to try a direct comparison taste test. In Puget Sound/Salish Sea we have five species of salmon: 

• Chinook or “King” salmon
• Coho or “Silver” salmon
• Sockeye or “Red” salmon
• Pink or “Humpy” salmon
• Chum or “Dog” salmon

I’ve caught all of the first four, but I’ve never seen a chum. As far as I know we don’t have any chum runs in my part of the region, and I hear they don’t taste that good anyway. Most people say that chinook tastes the best, but some argue that coho is better. Nobody would say that sockeye or pink salmon tastes better than those first two when cooked using traditional methods like baking, frying, or grilling. Smoking is another matter though. Winter is the perfect time to try a smoking experiment. Using what I have in my freezer now, I decided to compare a nice coho caught in Puget Sound with a Baker Lake sockeye. 

There are many different ways to smoke fish. You can use a dry brine or a wet brine, and you can hot smoke or cold smoke. Dry brining involves directly covering (or rubbing) a salt mixture onto the meat, while wet brining involves immersing the meat in a liquid salt solution. Hot smoking cooks and smokes at the same time. Cold smoking imparts a smoky flavor to your meat, but doesn’t necessarily cook it all the way through. The food is preserved through brining, and through the antibacterial properties of the smoke. It can produce a more jerky-like texture. Although the risk of bacterial infection is low, it’s not zero, so many people finish the process by cooking it in the oven. Fish is fully cooked at 145 degrees F. 

Most recreational fishermen around here have what they call a Little Chief or a Big Chief smoker by Smokehouse, which are designed primarily for cold smoking, because they are simple and inexpensive. They are supposed to maintain 165F, but often don’t, requiring finishing in the oven. Instead, I have a Recteq RT-B380 Bullseye wood pellet grill, which my cousin (a professional barbecue chef) had recommended. I think it was not really designed for smoking fish though, but rather pork, chicken, and beef. Its minimum temperature setting is 225 degrees, so it can only hot smoke. However, it vigorously produces smoke.

After thawing the fish, I cut open the vacuum seal bags, patted the fish dry with paper towels, and cut them into strips so that the brine could penetrate more of the fish. For my experiment I used a simple dry brine, consisting of:

• One cup kosher salt (you must non-iodized salt)
• Three cups brown sugar
• One tablespoon each of black pepper, dill weed, garlic powder, and chili powder

After stirring the brine mix, I put a little on the bottom and started layering the fish with the mix. The hardest part for me was keeping my two species separate somehow (I put the sockeye on top). Then I let it sit in the fridge overnight. Some people say to brine for 12 or even 24 hours, but to me it comes out too salty that way. I think eight hours is enough. When it’s done, there is a surprising amount of liquid in the bowl, which gets extracted from the fish by the brine. This leaves the fish slightly more firm than it was when it started.

In the morning I put the fish on bakers racks, and left them exposed in the fridge. This part of process forms what they call a “pellicle”, which is a sticky texture on the outside of the fish. This is absolutely necessary for smoking to work, because it’s what enables the smoke particles to stick to the fish. Some people do this for 24 hours, but I’ve found that it’s not necessary to go that long, especially if the fish is left outside the fridge. After six hours in the fridge, a pellicle wasn’t formed yet so I took it out for a couple more hours to accelerate the process. After two more hours, the fish was sticky to the touch and ready for the grill.

I loaded alder pellets into my smoker, although I often use cherry too. My grill takes about ten minutes to light, as its computer-controlled auger slowly pushes pellets in, tries to light them, and checks the temperature. Finally, it started billowing smoke, and got to 225 degrees in just a few minutes. It was time to place the fish in the grill. it’s got a nice electronic temperature probe built in, but I had unfortunately left it down in the flame area. So, I just used a round gage type thermometer and stuck it in the fattest piece I could find. 

I’ve consistently found that probe thermometers read too high, because of what they call “stem effect”. If the probe isn’t entirely immersed in the meat, then the part of its stem is exposed to the ambient temperature in the grill, which causes an inaccurate reading. When cooking fish, usually only the tip is in the meat. For this reason I’ve found that I have to read at least 155-160 degrees F before the fish is really done. 

When my fish had reached its temperature after about an hour, it was finally time for the taste test. I enlisted my wife to be the judge, and didn’t tell her which one was which. To my surprise, she picked the sockeye as the better tasting choice. She said it had a spicier flavor, and assumed that I had used a different brine. She didn’t realize that they had been brined together with the same mix, and were actually two different fish. When I sampled them myself, I had to agree that the sockeye definitely tasted better. 

Note that the sockeye on the right has a slightly more red color than the coho on the left.

My fishing buddy Dave came to this same conclusion a long time ago. In our opinion, chinook and coho are best prepared by baking, frying, or grilling. The cheaper, “less-desirable” sockeye and pink salmon actually taste better smoked then the “fancy fish”. I’ve noticed that when you see smoked salmon in the store it’s usually not wild caught chinook. If they do smoke chinook, it’s usually the farmed Atlantic kind. I should note that kokanee are in the same category as sockeye. A kokanee is just a small landlocked, sockeye salmon which never goes to sea, and is considered a subspecies which tastes essentially the same.

Here’s my tips on smoking salmon:

• Whatever method you use, make sure you cook it to 145 degrees F to be safe. 
• Don’t go overboard with the salt. It probably isn’t necessary to brine more than 8 hours.
• Keep it simple until you gain more experience. There’s a lot of exotic spices you could add to your brine mix, but even the basic recipe of one part salt, three parts brown sugar, and maybe a little black pepper will produce excellent results. 

Maybe next summer I’ll have all four species to try, but then I don’t know if I want to waste chinook that way. Pinks only come in odd-numbered years, so 2025 will be a pink year. I should be able to add that species to the test.