I still love my Smokin-It smoker, but have since been using my Grilla Pellet Poopers more than the trusty Smokin-It #3. I did use it this past weekend though in combination with my Grilla Chimp to get all of that country style sausage done and it worked great as usual.

The one tip that I will give you regarding the Jerky Dryer is to not put that on until your smoke phase is done because the excess air will just blow all of that smoke out of the cooking chamber and the excess oxygen will most likely result in your wood catching fire. I usually smoke for about 2-3 hours and then put the dryer on.

Hopefully this helps.

Hi Dave, you can do jerky and sticks in the Smokin-It smokers and they turn out awesome. You just need to have/use a Jerky fan to remove the excess moisture.

I smoked 120 pounds of country style sausage through my smoker this past weekend and used my jerky dryer. You can buy the dryer from Smokin-It (that is what I did) or there are several DIY options on the Smokin-It forums as well.

I searched “salmon” at the SmokinIt forums and read every post today. Turns out most agree just 1 or 2 hours smoke and less than 2oz total wood. I didn’t know those forums existed until seeing a 5 year old post by NDKoze I think.

That smoker is super airtight, so drying things out like jerky or smokesticks will be hard. But brisket and butts, where the relative humidity issue stalls things at 150ish, apparently work awesome in it. So I expect I will continue to sous vide finish sticks.

1. 4 hrs brine was good. I rinsed 1.5 hrs, but I don’t think it was needed for salt levels.
2. Using Smokin It, or other similar tight sealed insulated smoker like CookShack that I heard it is copied from, 0.5 to 2 hrs would be enough smoke, there is almost no smoke loss.
3. External CSG, I used Bellas. With ice tray in smoker, it held 64f decent even up to 75 ambient.
4. Bellas would smoke for 8 or 9 hours easy. Fill it only 1/4 full, lowest airpump setting, use alder or other light wood.
5. Don’t put samon in cold, trying to keep temps down like I did… I dried it unwrapped in fridge, but warm it to ambient. Else you get smoke liquid, mostly acetic acid vinegar, condensing in drops on meat.
6. Personally, I will likely do lox as a cure only, no smoke. Maybe a drop or two liquid smoke in brine. If I’m going to smoke it, I will do a hot cook smoke. I just didnt feel the smoke added a ton to the cure that I liked.
7. If you fail to put your drip pan under smoker, because you’ve got a drip pan inside holding ice… you WILL get heinous smoke juice concentrate all over your patio. In which case, a commercial degreaser and powerwasher will convince your wife to let you keep the smoker there.

Really I think I just wasn’t used to the new smoker, and how smoke tight it was, and just massively oversmoked the fish.

I cold smoked it last night after 6 hrs drying in fridge from 0200 to 0930, so 7.5 hrs.
Ambient temp in Phx was 61 f to 75 f. I put 2 trays of ice in smoker, and piped in smoke with my Bellas CSG. Smoker temp was 62 to 65 f using thermoworks probe. TONS of smoke, after 7.5 hrs and solid smoke production I still had 25% chips and pellets left. Cherry wood and alder.

My thoughts:

1. Waaaaay to smoky. In future I will maybe kiss the lox with 30 min, 1 hr max.
2. As mentioned above by someone, I didnt love the smoke taste profile, too much bitter note as well as acetic acid vinegar. The airtight Smokin It let the vinegar produced in smoke chips condense on fish for a noticeable taste. You can see a light ring near surface, that is move of a ceviche cooked thing than heat.
3. Brined Lox vs. Cold smoked salmon… I think most of us are thinking of brined product, I know I was. Nova lox has a light smoke, that is likely all I will do in future, or more likely just brine cure and eat without smoke.
4. Salt content-- very good, exactly what I wanted, not too salty. This was 4 hrs in 21% brine, 1.5 hr rinse soak. So I discussed a lot of salt datapoints above, this is a good one for strong brine. I will say, I believe the broad range now, I could have 2x the salt as this or half and still like it.
5. Still tasted great, but such strong smoke it needs to be eaten in small amounts, appetizer style.

Lastly… my patio, clothes, kitchen, and every blue ice packet I own, all smell like smoke lol. I was up from 0200 to 0700 numerous times checking on my CSG and first smoker use. But I don’t feel it is worth the effort for cold smoked salmon, think I’d rather have Lox
Great first use and experiment, thanks to everyone for their valuable opiniins and recipes and ideas!

In this case, processhead is correct in all his points above. The much shorter brine time is calculated for, 1 to 8 hrs vs. 36 to 72 hrs most use with a more dilute equilibrium brine. But mostly it is using FDA amounts instead of an arbitrarily lower amount I think.

USFDA has different amounts of nitrite allowed if mixed into commutated meat like sausage, 156ppm, vs a dry rub, 625ppm I think, vs a brine or pump/massage 200ppm. For a brine, you actually calculate the uptake per the USFDA as well as the total volume of brine vs. Meat volume if equilibrium curing. So if you pump a brisket with 10% brine, that is used. If you just immerse, the water weight pickup is used. So there are different tables for brine. All of that is in his book, as well as the USFDA regs he references. Anyways, due to the large water vs. Meat volumes, the correct amount of cure always looks high.

You can use less nitrate, but Marianski cites info that shows below 40-50 ppm of nitrite it’s ability to color fix and protect against c botulin are questionable especially for longer danger zone times like you get in cold smoking. By the time you pull from smoker nitrate is hugely reduced and drops off to almost zero in days, due to rapid conversion to nitric oxide. Foods like cold smoked salmon which do not undergo a heat lethality treatment actually have a MINIMUM REQUIRED ingoing nitrite of 120ppm to ensure safety. Most non-commercial recipes which don’t ever get subjected to, or have to pass, a Food Safety Inspection Service review, just ignore all their data and requirements.

I use a brine calculator at diggingdogfarm
dot com as well as Marianski’s tables and calcs for the cure#1 amounts

Since I already typed so much, for answer completion I will paste the start of Marianski’s brine calc example, where you can see the limit is actually 6T with a 10% pickup, Salmon in an 80degree brine is 3-4%:
“Immersed, Pumped and Massaged Products Here, it is much harder to come up with a universal formula as there are so many variables that have to be determined first. The main factor is to determine % pump when injecting the meat with a syringe or % pick-up when immersing meat in a curing solution. We will calculate the formula for 1 gallon of water, Cure #1 and 10% pick-up gain. Then the formula can be multiplied or divided to accommodate different amounts of meat. 10% pump or 10% pick-up mean that the cured meat should absorb 10% of the brine in relation to its original weight. For immersion, pumped or massaged products, the maximum in-going nitrite limit is 200 ppm and that corresponds to adding 4.2 oz of Cure #1 to 1 gallon of water. 1 gallon (8.33 lb) of water Cure #1 in ounces Cure #1 in grams Cure #1 in teaspoons 4.2 120 20 tsp (6 Tbsp)”

just an observation…fallis10 recipe has 4 grams of cure #1 per 1 gallon of water and Dave in AZ recipe has 15 grams cure #1 per half gallon of water…am I missing something here ???

Not sure you are missing anything, but when using a liquid brine with salt and cure, there will be some variability in how much of the salt and cure is actually absorbed by the meat/fish.
The amount of time the fish/meat is in the wet brine is probably the biggest variable, as I see it. The salt and cure will transfer into the meat, and the longer the meat is in the cover brine, the more salt it will absorb until the salt/cure levels reach equilibrium.

A concentrated brine is going to transfer salt and cure to the meat more quickly. I think you would need to be careful to not leave the fish in a strong brine too long or risk an overly salty product or cure amount that is something higher than what you want.