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Thank You For Smoking

By Patrick F. McManus

Mar 13, 2008

After having been a steelhead fisherman for more than 40 years, I recently confessed this aberration to my doctor. He said that, as deplorable and incurable as this condition might be, he didn't think it would make me dangerous to myself or others, and certainly not to steelhead. He himself is a chukar hunter, mostly on the steep breaks of the Snake River. So he should talk.

The point of this essay is simply to provide instruction on how to smoke a steelhead. It is a step-by-step procedure based on my own recent experience of smoking a couple of large steelhead.

The steelhead is a sea-run trout, an actual fish, although many anglers believe it to be a mythical creature, a cruel joke played on them by their friends and enemies to get them out on an icy river at the crack of dawn. There are fiends who will actually do this, and the rotten no-good.... But I don't want to get carried away. Dedicated fishermen might go through a lifetime without hooking a single steelhead. It is, however, quite easy to pretend that you have caught numerous steelhead, but that is a topic for another how-to piece.

For the purpose of this lesson, I will use my own experience in smoking my couple of steelhead. (I have witnesses to the catching, although I would not believe them myself.)

First, let me explain that most of my life I have been interested in preserving food by the process of smoking. As a child, I could never understand why my folks insisted upon preserving our own home-raised pork with curing salt rather than build a smokehouse. I can still remember rubbing curing salt into slabs of bacon. If my recollection is correct, my hands were better preserved than the bacon. My folks didn't seem to mind eating deteriorating bacon around March or April, but what could you expect from persons who made and ate blood sausage and headcheese! My family could gross out the average civilized diner at a hundred yards.

Eventually, at about age 35, I finally made enough money to buy a hovel of my own and move my little family into it. It was sort of a small suburban farm, on which I thought we might be able to become self-sustaining by growing our own food and such. (Writers have such weird ideas.) One of my first tasks was to build, at long last, my own smokehouse. It was about 2 feet square and 6 feet high, and made of used cedar boards. I drilled a hole in the door and inserted through the hole the long proboscis of a meat thermometer, so I could keep track of the temperature inside. About 6 feet away, I dug a hole in the ground and lined it with bricks. I ran a sewer pipe underground from the hole over to the smokehouse. (I recommend that if you build your own smokehouse of this design, you buy a new section of sewer pipe.)

Thus I could build in the hole a fire with, say, apple wood or alder, and the smoke would cool as it flowed through the sewer pipe to the smokehouse. I could control the temperature by sliding a large flat rock back and forth over the fire hole. It was a very nice setup, except for the fact that visitors often mistook the smokehouse for a privy. This can be a real downer, especially for a person who loves his smokehouse.

I smoked all kinds of things in my smokehouse. For example, I once made antelope sausage, stuffing it in casings my wife, Bun, sewed from muslin. Even though the smoked links in no way resembled an antelope, my young daughters, still enamored of Bambi, refused to eat them.

Another time I smoked some carp and took it to a party. I explained that it was salmon. The guests loved it, including two airline stewardesses who gorged themselves on the "salmon" to the extent that they became quite ill and were out in the yard…. Well, I won't go into that. They no doubt would have been much sicker if I had told them they had been eating carp. 

Perhaps the most startling of my smoked creations was a turkey. I had forgotten to tie down its wings and legs, and it came out looking like a fat brown Superman preparing to leap from a tall building. After laughing themselves sick, the girls refused to eat any of it.

For all these years, then, I have been smoking various foods—mostly fish, but occasionally jerky. I once took some of my smoked jerky on a backpacking trip with a professor friend of mine, who referred to the gnarled little black pieces as resembling something that might be found in the vicinity of a small camel. He nevertheless ate a considerable quantity.

I should point out that I no longer use a smokehouse but a product called Little Chief. I don't usually name products, but as I view the Little Chief as one of the great inventions in the whole history of the civilized world, I do so here. Now, at last, here is how to smoke a steelhead, with detailed instructions based on my own recent experience.

First, you go out to your garage and lay a sheet of plywood or perhaps an old door across two sawhorses. This will make you an adequate filleting table.

Do not—I repeat, DO NOT—attempt to fillet the steelhead in the kitchen. This can be dangerous to your health. I don't think an explanation is necessary.

Once you have the filleting table set up, take the fish from the cooler in which you transported it home. The fish will be bent in the shape of the letter C. That is because the cooler was too small for the steelhead. In my case, the cooler was very large but I still had to bend the fish to get it to fit. I had covered the fish with ice obtained from a hotel ice machine. I can't recommend using hotel ice. It has no ill effects on fish, but a good deal on hotel managers. Maybe you should go to a store and buy a couple bags of ice.

You might wish to speed up the process of straightening your steelhead. I recommend that you arrange the fish so that the bent part is facing up. Then you place a newspaper over the bent part and place a bag of lead shot on top of the newspaper. It has been many years since I've purchased a bag of lead shot, and I don't know how much it now costs. I would not recommend that you run out at this time and buy shot. It is better to substitute some other object, such as a heavy car jack. This will cut in half the time required to straighten your fish.

Once your fish has straightened out, you can begin the filleting process. First, remove the lead shot or car jack. Then take your fillet knife and—wait, I should say a word here about fillet knives. Years ago I bought a large fillet knife. Its blade is at least 18 inches long and, in theory at least, it allows you to slice off a large fillet from each side of your fish in a single graceful motion. The knife was very expensive but worth every dollar. For example, one of my sons-in-law once said to me, "Wow! What do you use a knife like that for?" I said, "For filleting large steelhead and salmon." See, the knife paid for itself right there.

Alas, in this instance, the knife would not penetrate the skin of the steelhead and I had to resort to the small knife I use for cleaning and skinning perch. Once the fillets had been whittled off, I attempted to remove the skin. Neither my large knife nor the small one allowed me to slice between the skin and the fillet itself. So I simply cut the fillets up into 3-inch-square chunks ready to go into the brine. I knew that after smoking, the skin would slip right off. Actually, it's quite a bit of fun, peeling the skin from pieces of smoked steelhead, provided you have a low entertainment threshold.

Once you have your steelhead fillets cut up into chunks, just place them in a large bowl and pour 2 cups each of brown sugar and non-iodized salt over them. Then—well, in my case, I discovered at that point that I had only 1 cup of brown sugar. So I drove to the store and bought another package. The trip took scarcely more than an hour and $15 in gas. I poured the second cup of brown sugar over the fish and started to add the salt. It was at that point that I discovered our salt was iodized. So I drove back to the store for non-iodized salt. This trip took scarcely more than an hour and $20 in gas. (The price of Regular had gone up in the meantime.) I poured the salt over the steelhead. This is a very simple method of making brine, because salt and sugar will draw the juices out of the fish and provide the curing liquid. Because we usually eat the smoked fish within a day or two, I'm not sure about the degree of curing. You're on your own here.

I like to let the fish remain in the brine for eight hours. Because it was now two in the afternoon, the fish would be ready for the Little Chief by 10 in the evening. Because I let it smoke for six hours, this means by four in the morning my smoked steelhead would be done. I checked the TV guide for late-evening and early-morning shows.

And that's all there is to smoking a steelhead. Well, first you have to catch one. So while you're sitting there on your patio, watching your Little Chief puff away, you may recall that the last time you were in a fish shop, fillets of smoked salmon were going for $20 a pound! You smile to yourself, knowing that this is your own steelhead you're smoking, the one you caught yourself. Indeed, you chortle out loud, thinking about all the people who choose to take the cheap way out. Ha! $20 a pound! Those pikers!

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