Smoking salmon at home...

One of my interests is traditional American barbecue (as opposed to grilling); I have both a New Braunfels Silver Smoker offset and a (gasp) Brinkman's Electric bullet.  While I prefer the offset for most anything, I've made several attempts at smoking fish (specifically, salmon) and the electric is much easier to manage for this.  Note that the 'stock' Brinkman's runs around 230F, which is too hot to produce good hot-smoked salmon, so I had to make a modification.  It's easy really; I got a 2000W rotary dimmer, a heavy-duty 6-foot extension cord, some twist-on caps and a bunch of zip-ties and made up a heavy-duty,  in-line dimmer (obviously, not to code).  It's easy now to dial the smoker down to 160-165F for hours on end, and the dimmer heat-sink doesn't even get (too) warm.  If you try this at home, don't skimp - you really need a 2000W dimmer for the 1500W electric smoker.

An important part of getting good smoked salmon (or any fish, for that matter) is brining the fillets before smoking them to set up a pellicle.  I'd made several attempts using a dry brine, a mixture of non-iodized salt, sugar, brown sugar and spices that is used to coat the fish, and was never happy with the results.  Dry brining just left way too much salt on the fish no matter what I did, and the spices really don't alter the flavor of the end result.

This week, I tried a traditional wet brine, in which I mixed just 1/4 cup each non-iodized salt, sugar and brown sugar into a gallon of water and soaked the 1.5" to 2" chunks of fillet overnight in the brine (in a covered plastic tub, in a refrigerator).  After draining and patting the pieces dry, I dusted them with a little black pepper - that's all - let then air-dry on a wire rack for about an hour, and then smoked them at 165F for 8 hours using a handful of Alder pellets  in the bottom of the smoker about every 45 minutes for the first 5 hours.  Well, 8 hours was a guess and it was too long for most of the pieces; they tasted great but were a bit over-cooked.  My next trial at this will probably dial the process in, smoking for around 6 hours and tossing-in a handful of Alder pellets every 45 minutes or so the entire time.


Posted by danasblog [General] ( March 15, 2006 07:08 PM ) Permalink

Something silly - "Fear Of Girls"

Google Video is great fun; this following short movie is simply amazing. I'm sure I'm not alone remembering FRP enthusiasts like these.

Posted by danasblog [General] ( January 31, 2006 02:42 PM ) Permalink

Suppose I ought to introduce myself...

I'm Dana Myers, and I'm in the Solaris engineering organization where I spend most of my time leading the Solaris ACPI engineering effort. In my nearly 12 years at Sun, I've been a Solaris x86 engineer, a Consumer/Embedded engineer, a Java Wireless BizDev technologist, and once again a Solaris engineer. While my focus in on providing a high-quality ACPI sub-system based on Intel's excellent ACPI CA interpreter, you might find me tinkering with pretty much any system-board level thing. I still have a soft-spot for network device drivers - perhaps some of you are still using the PCnet-PCI driver in Solaris? I was pleasantly surprised to find a fair bit of the code I wrote at the end of 1994 is still visible in that driver. Coming back to Solaris engineering after a long absence, at a time with so much new energy and new development as we dramatically expand x86 and x64 support, this is such a rush! Just so I don't start thinking it is as good as it gets, I was fortunate to be able to join the Newboot development team - Newboot was my first customer for the new Solaris ACPI subsystem. My ACPI-team colleague David Chieu quickly developed the ISA-device enumeration code on top of the new interpreter, and we're pleased to have filled-in a key piece of Newboot. I'll be blogging a bit about the relatively few, relatively minor issues I've encountered since integrating ACPI CA into Solaris. In general, ACPI CA is working extremely well - the issues we've seen are generally related to how I've changed the way that Solaris interacts with the system. The biggest change is that we run the system in ACPI-mode now, not legacy mode - but I'll save that for another blog. Cheers!

Posted by danasblog [General] ( June 14, 2005 09:40 AM ) Permalink | Comments[0]

Dtrace: kool-aid worth drinking

So, a few days ago I installed an experimental Solaris kernel build, and my mouse stopped working. In the old days, before dtrace, this would have meant digging around in kernel source, building experimental modules and running the kernel debugger. This time, though, I wrote a few lines of "D" code, kicked-off dtrace and a few minutes later I'd located exactly where the error was occurring. It just took another couple of minutes to check to see if the source file had been recently modified - and I found the bug had just been fixed the day before, I just needed to grab the updated source. Start to finish, it took under 30 minutes to resolve this issue. dtrace is an *amazing* tool.

Posted by danasblog [General] ( May 10, 2005 11:05 AM ) Permalink | Comments[0]