Smoking

[den]

This will only be of interest to one of you.

Today I smoked fillets of cod. I soaked the fillets in brine for a couple of hours before-hand, then put them straight on the top grill without the water pan. It was effectively a dry smoke rather than the steaming smoke with the pan.

What makes me really happy about this is that I used a small packet of iron-bark wood I purchased from a local camping store. Iron bark is an Australian hardwood that grows around here. From the colour of the wood it looks like it's just the heartwood of the tree with none of the sapwood or bark. The store also has stringybark lumps for sale so I might give that a go next time.

The verdict on Aussie wood and salty fish? My goodness I couldn't get enough! It was just astonishing how nice it tasted.

Comments

[brucebergman.livejournal.com]

Well, the second response just blows your whole theory right out of the water - or the smoke, as the case may be...

Smoking is a great way to cook, only problem with doing fish on a grill or smoker is it has a very narrow window between raw ("and I don't feel so good..."), done, and "eeeeewww, fish leather"...

I hate wrecking perfectly good defenseless food, so I stick to the simpler stuff.

Then the next wrinkle, figuring out what woods work best, and you have a totally different taxonomy to work with. I doubt there are too many members of the Eucalyptus family that will work well, unless you are cooking for a Drop Bear. ;-)

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I cooked until the thinnest bits of the fillets were going tough, then stopped cooking. The rest of the fillets were very yummy.

Choosing the wood wasn't random; it is packaged as "smoking wood" so someone has tried it before I did. No way would I experiment with local wood! I prefer my food to NOT taste like throat lozenges.