How To Hot Smoke Salmon
By Nicola Lando
Hot smoked salmon is one of the most versatile ingredients. Serve individual fillets at a buffet lunch. Cut into chunks and build a salad with pickled beetroot, sour cream and new potatoes. Or flake and stir with dill and crème fraîche to top an oatcake as an elegant canapé.
How can I smoke the salmon?
Hot smoking salmon is incredibly simple. With a Cameron stovetop smoker or Cameron Gourmet Mini Smoker you can smoke fish on your hob, indoors. You can use gas, induction, an electric hob, or even an aga.
How do I prepare the salmon for smoking?
We just sprinkle a little salt over the salmon and leave for an hour before smoking. This helps season it and removes extra water, making the salmon taste richer when cooked.
But if you don’t have that extra hour before smoking, not to worry! Pat dry the fillet or side of salmon and place directly in your smoker.
Then choose your wood chips. With fish we like oak, beech, apple or cherry - or even maple’s sweetness. Beware of hickory as it will certainly be too strong.
What you will need
- 1 salmon fillet
- A pinch of sea salt
- A Cameron's stovetop smoker
- Wood Chips
Method
- Prepare the salmon - sprinkle a little salt over the salmon and leave for an hour before smoking. This helps season it and removes extra water, making the salmon taste richer when cooked.
- Place one to two tablespoons of wood chips in a small pile in the centre of the smoker base. Lay the drip tray and rack in position on top.
- Line the tray with foil for easier clean up. Add the trivet and place on the salmon fillet.
- Place on any stovetop (gas, electric, induction or aga). Medium heat settings yield the best results.
- Leave for up to 20 minutes. See notes below for how to alter the cook time depending on the size of your fillet and heat of the stove.
- Check the temperature of your salmon then enjoy!
How long will the salmon take to cook?
A 600g side of salmon like in these photos will take 15-20 minutes depending on how high you set the heat on your stove. And an individual fillet might take as little as 10 minutes to hot smoke.
Always check the temperature of your fish when cooked, either by pressing to see how tender it is. Or - our preferred way - by using a probe thermometer.
You can see a beautiful orange hue develops on the surface of the salmon from the smoke. Delicious!
What size smoker do I need?
To give you a sense of scale, the smoker in these photographs is the Camerons Stovetop Smoker. If you're just cooking a couple of fillets for two people, or for canapés, you might prefer the half size Camerons Gourmet Mini Smoker.
For more BBQ & smoking recipes click here or browse our range of food smokers.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
