Salmon Processing Tutorial

Here we are in Hyderburg. I'm at the smokehouse that I grew up learning how to smoke fish in, and we got 7 sockeye out of the freezer from last year. So we're just going to kind of briefly go through, and I'm going to show you how I split them and hang them in the smokehouse for kippered fish. It's a pretty common and pretty popular way in Southeast Alaska and up and down the coast on preserving fish. Everybody's got their own methods, their own techniques, but this is just the way that I've learned how to do it.

I start by just cutting the head off the sockeye.

No specific way, just head comes off. These fish are still a little bit firm from coming out of the freezer, but I think they'll work. Now once I do that, my grandpa would always tell you when you're starting, you face that head away. I'm going to come in here, I'm going to go down the backbone with the head away from me, the head side of the fish away from me, cutting all the way to the backbone.

Flip it around, right to the backbone on the other side.

Fish are a bit frozen, so they're a little bit harder to cut up than fresh fish.

Clean up the fins a little bit.

And then that's ready for brine. It's ready to be brined and then hung on the sticks, and we'll do half of the time of our smoke with the skin, this meat on the inside, and then we'll come back and we'll flip it and do some out there just to evenly get the smoke on it. And then after you do that, you come in and you split it. We're going to start with both of these fillets, and each fillet I'm gonna cut down the center, make sure all these bones are off of here and the fins are off.

Starting on the tail side, that's kind of where I split from, right down the center. After I got each one, then I'm gonna come about 3/4 of the way up with a different knife and cut.

Leaving them connected, kind of like pants. You see these pants here, like trousers. After you brine that, that gets brined, and then that gets put right on the stick like that for smoking. With these backbones too, what we did with our last batch with these girls is— a lot of people do it, but they just break them. Brine them the same you'd brine them in a saltwater brine and then hang them on the sticks like that so that they get smoke.

And then once they're done, you take a spoon and you scrape all this meat off, and that meat is what they call hash. The whole idea behind our department is just to kind of promote and show different ways that we, we handle our resources, and by resources I mean the the land that keeps us alive, you know, like all this fish, these salmon have had our backs for thousands of years and we use them in so many different ways. They're such a staple in us being in this part of the world that we've got to try to spread more knowledge on how to, how to use this resource and how to traditionally preserve some of the, some of the practices around them. So I think it's super important, you know, like these girls that have been working with us the through the YES program, they're learning a lot this summer because we've been doing a lot of work around these types of fish. If I can teach somebody and then they can teach somebody, then that's the goal overall, is just the knowledge gets spread a little bit more.

So once we get the salmon to look like this, we then drop it into a saltwater brine. And saltwater brine for me is just— the trick that we usually do is the floating potato trick. So you put a potato in there and you start adding salt to it. As you're stirring it up, the density of the water will float that potato, and once you get that potato to kind of float, then you kind of have about the proper amount of salt. And then you go with the fish into the water, and that goes for anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes.

We have let our fish brine for 7 minutes in salt water. Now we're going to hang them on the stick. They're going to do a glaze for few hours before we start the fire on them to start the smoking process.

So the salt mixed with the smoking process cures it about 75% of the way. So the next process is to get these fish in a jar so that we could boil them and then finish the curing process. So this is what we— how we do them. We cut them to the size that they need to be, and then they go right into the jar. We just fill up the jars, so that's all we're doing here.

Skin side in. Yeah, it looks really good this way, but people do put the skin side in. But also people say they don't want the, uh, the, um, skin to stick to the jar when you cook it, which it will stick to the jar. So that's another reason why they do skin side in, but mainly it's for appearances. And then after we do that What we will do is put a teaspoon of oil, like olive oil, inside each one, or, um, yeah, olive or avocado oil.

And then when you put that on there, just hand tight, and then right into the pressure cooker it goes. About 90 minutes at about 10 to 15 pounds. If you're going to boil it, you bring it to a boil for about 3.5 hours. So depending on your setup, hour and a half of boiling or 3 hours of boiling. Every community you go to is going to be a little bit different, or actually every person you talk to will do it a little bit different.

But the boring thing is that you're just doing it. Your family's got fish or somebody gave you fish, and just being able to know how to work around it and preserve it is super important for us. And so that's really what it's all about, is just showing the next generation this is how we do it. And if you can follow this, then at least you'll get some meals for— you'll find some purpose in in and around that fish, and that's, that's a very important thing for us.