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

Living with a loquacious BIOS (or what's all that stuff in /var/adm/messages?)

I haven't heard any complaints about this yet, but I recently noticed that /var/adm/messages on my Acer Ferrari 3400 was filling up with jabber from the system BIOS, like this:

Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 927697 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] String: [0x8] "QUERY_09"
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 486228 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] String: [0xD] "CMBatt - SMSL"
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 214751 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] Integer: 0x F1
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 920918 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] String: [0x12] "CMBatt - CHBP.BAT1"
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 729625 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] String: [0x1B] "CMBatt - BAT1 still present"
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 578842 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] String: [0x12] "CMBatt - UPBI.BAT1"
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 776413 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] Package: [0xD Elements]
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 411424 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] (0) Integer: 0x 1
Mar 15 16:23:22 unknown acpica: [ID 923811 kern.notice] [ACPI Debug] (1) Integer: 0x 1130

Pretty exciting, eh?  Back in Solaris Nevada build 29, I fixed kernel printf() so Solaris ACPI CA debug output would work, and I left the default ACPI CA "debug level" setting intact.  One of the things that the default level sends to /var/adm/messages is when an ACPI BIOS contains ASL statements like:

                Store ("CMBatt - BAT1 STATE CHANGE", Debug)
and
                Store (PBST, Debug)

The Acer Ferrari 3400 BIOS is peppered with them.  Some of you are already familiar with Intel's ACPI CA interpreter and know that there is a gobal variable to select levels of debug output, and may have just fixed it yourself (gold stars for all of you) but I'd bet a dollar there are many more people that are just suffering in silence.   Well, here's the easy way to make it stop - add the following line to /etc/system and reboot:


That's all.  If you really don't want to see any debug output from ACPI CA, you set it to 0, but that's a bit extreme.  For more information, have a look at this ACPI CA header file in OpenSolaris.

Solaris Nevada will continue to default to leaving this feature turned on, but I'll change the default for Solaris 10 when I backport to an update release.




Posted by danasblog [ACPI] ( March 15, 2006 05:40 PM ) Permalink