Smokin' Fish

Smoked fish, for me, reminds me of European grandparents - from my Yorkshire Grandfather's smoked cod fisherman's pie to my German uncle going eeling in the big dam across the road from us and smoking eel. So growing our own trout to smoke seemed like a fabulous idea and I'm pretty proud of this little project. It's also an an old blog post I did when we made it, but I thought it worth sharing on Steemit with the lovely Steemians!

The thing is, I wasn’t about to let Jamie buy a smoker – when he could make one. Rising to the challenge, we started looking for a metal box that was sealable. He’d picked up two stainless steel beer barrels from the tip ready for a brewing project, which was pretty much perfect. Of course, google came in handy and we found some pretty nifty devices – our only concern is that they were all for meat, and we couldn’t find any pictures with fish, but figured it was going to work anyway. Part of the reason then for posting this is to hope someone out there will find our beer barrel fish smoker and go: AH! Smokkkkkkkiiiinnnnn!!

So, firstly – angle grind the barrel so you have about three quarters for the bottom half, and a quarter for the top half. Then you need to get the top half and whack it with a hammer so it flanges outward (see below) so the top will fit snugly over the bottom like a lid.

Then, make a brazier style basket that will sit in the bottom, keeping the coals off the bottom so the air flow underneath keeps the fire lit. We used a cake cooler for the grill for the fish to lay upon.

Then find a can (of course we used a baked bean can - do you have ANY idea how much Jamie loves baked beans?) for the chimney:

Now, once you’ve gutted and cleaned the fish, find a recipe for marinating it online. We’ve got a bit of experimenting to do here, but basically we used a cup of salt and half a cup of sugar, rubbed it in the fish cavity and left it for an hour. Meanwhile, we put a cup of woodchips onto soak, and lit the brazier, so some nice coals were going on.

So the next bit was easy – drain the woodchips (we used a mix of mesquite and hickory from Bunnings, as we liked the idea of a stronger smoke flavour) and put them on top of the coals. Pop the fish on top of the cake cooler grill. Put the lid on. Let it cook! It took about ten minutes for the fish to be ready – they were fairly small. It was TOTALLY delicious and the smoker looks pretty gorgeous just sitting there waiting for the next catch of fish to be smoked. Smokin!

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Let me know if you've made something like this, or plan on making one! We've also smoked mushrooms, peppers and eggplant on it too - delicious!