Kitchen appliances and utensils: smokehouse, knife, cutting board, mesh for drying.
Ingredients
| Mackerel | 6 pcs |
| Bay leaf | 1-2 pcs. |
| Allspice | 2-3 pcs. |
| Ground black pepper | 0.5 tsp |
| Water | 2 l |
| Salt | 3 tbsp. l |
Step cooking
Before you cook cold smoked fish, you need to pickle and salt it. Today we will cook mackerel, in the recipe the number of ingredients is indicated for six fish, you can smoke more, increasing the dosage of these ingredients according to the proportion.
- First, remove the head and the insides from the mackerel. The insides are best removed so as not to cut the belly. Then the carcass of the fish will remain denser after smoking due to the fact that less air will enter it. We cut the fish and rinse.
- We send the carcasses into convenient dishes, put them tightly, and fill them with marinade. Here they will be pickled for three days. Pour 2 liters of water into a separate pan, add 3 tablespoons of salt, tear two bay leaves into small pieces. Add five peas of allspice and 0.5 tsp. ground pepper. We mix everything, let the salt dissolve completely and fill it with the resulting solution of mackerel. If the fish comes up and remains not completely covered with water, do the oppression. To do this, put a heavy plate on top, cover the dishes for pickling with a lid and send to the refrigerator for three days.
- Three days later, we remove the mackerel from the brine, hang it on the street in a well-ventilated place where there is a shadow, with its tails up for a couple of hours, so that the glass is excess liquid.
- Then we shift the carcasses into a special net for drying the fish, and leave it for a few more hours. If you cook fish in the summer, it is better to postpone the start of smoking in the evening, when the temperature in the street is not higher than 20 degrees Celsius.
- We pass metal, strong hooks through the edge of the fish tails, hang the fish on a square grid, keeping the distance from each other. We melt the smoke generator, our smokehouse, so that the temperature inside is no higher than 26 degrees. Open the lid, place in the smokehouse fish, close the lid and leave it overnight. The total exposure time is approximately 12 hours. Every hour the temperature in the smokehouse will drop. At night, the smoke generator can be disconnected from the compressor. But his work is completely dependent on the condition of your smokehouse, so adjust it at your discretion. Within 12 hours of smoking we check the smokehouse, look at the condition of the fish, the temperature in it, check for chips. After this time, we take out the fish and hang it out in the shade on the street, let it air out to remove the pungent smell of smoke. Good, it will take a day to air, but you can withstand at least 12 hours.
- After that, you can bring the finished cold smoked mackerel into the house and eat. It will be a great treat for beer. Also suitable for self-consumption, it will be delicious with salad or boiled potatoes.
Video recipe
And now we offer you to watch a video where a resident of Voronezh demonstrated the whole process of preparation and cold smoking of mackerel. You will learn how the marinade turns out, how to properly cut the fish, what happens after full cooking.
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