How to Smoke Salmon

Salmon is one of the most popular fish in America, and I count myself among its fans. I love this versatile, pleasantly fatty fish grilled, baked, and sautéed, but my favorite way to cook salmon is to hot smoke it in a smoker or on a grill. Hot-smoked salmon is silky and tender on the inside with a delicately chewy exterior capped off with a smoky, slightly sweet flavor. It’s great to enjoy on its own, flaked and stirred into fluffy rice or scrambled eggs, or as a worthy substitute for store-bought smoked salmon for bagels. 

While delicate fish can be daunting to cook on a grill or in a smoker because it’s prone to sticking to grill grates, tearing, and overcooking, salmon’s relatively high fat content and firm flesh mean it holds up well when cooked on a grill or in a smoker. And, as I’ll outline below, hot smoking is also easier than cold smoking, making hot-smoked salmon a great—and surprisingly easy—dish when you want to treat yourself and your family or guests. It’s even relatively economical, especially when you compare home-smoked salmon to store-bought smoked salmon or lox. Here’s everything you need to know about making hot-smoked salmon at home.

Hot Smoking vs. Cold Smoking

In the times before refrigeration, both hot smoking and cold smoking were common ways to preserve salmon and other foods. These techniques were used around the world, including by indigenous people in pre-colonial North America and Canada. When salmon is smoked, it goes through a curing process and a slight dehydration period that prevents bacteria from spoiling the food as fast as it would for fresh salmon. 

The two popular approaches to smoking salmon are the cold-smoking method and the hot-smoking method. Hot-smoked salmon is brined briefly (for a few hours) and cooks as it smokes, typically at around 225°F. Cold-smoked salmon is cured for at least one day and often longer and then smoked at a much lower temperature, usually around 90°F and for a much longer period of time, usually at least 12 hours. 

As a result, hot- and cold-smoked salmon look and taste very different. Hot-smoked salmon more closely resembles conventionally cooked salmon, with firm flesh that easily flakes apart. Cold-smoked salmon’s texture is silkier and moist—more like gravlax or lox—and cuts well into delicate, translucent slices. And since hot-smoked salmon is cooked at a higher temperature, the wood burns at a faster rate and emits more smoke, which results in a stronger smoky flavor in hot-smoked salmon than cold-smoked salmon. Cold-smoked salmon is also notably more salty due to its extended curing time.

Cold-smoked salmon is delicious, but making it at home is tricky to do properly and safely and it takes longer to make than hot-smoked salmon. If the salmon is not cured properly before cold-smoking, it can be an ideal breeding ground for bacteria. Plus monitoring and maintaining a low smoking temperature for 12 or more hours is a lot of work. When hot smoking, the fish smokes for only an hour and doesn’t require hours of temperature control and babysitting the way cold smoked salmon does. That’s why I prefer hot smoking, and why I think it’s the more approachable and better choice for smoking salmon at home.

The basic method for hot smoking salmon is simple, though it does involve several steps: Salt (and often sugar) are applied to the salmon before it’s brined in the fridge, then it’s rinsed and goes back into the fridge to dry before the final step of smoking over a grill or in a smoker. While each step is easy, you do need to pay attention to the details to get silky, rich, and perfectly cooked hot-smoked salmon at home. Here’s how to select the best salmon possible, brine, dry, and smoke it for a final result that is as gorgeous as it is delicious.

The Best Salmon for Hot Smoking

I prefer to smoke a big skin-on side of salmon. It’s a great showpiece for entertaining, and if you’re not serving a large crowd, it can be cut up and refrigerated or frozen for later use. The larger cut also cooks more slowly, allowing time to develop more smoke flavor while cooking. The most obvious advice I’ll give for selecting salmon for smoking at home is to use the best quality salmon available and the variety that fits within your budget. But here’s the kicker: best quality doesn’t always mean fresh. What’s most important is to look for fish that is still pristine, whether it was previously frozen or is truly fresh (as in never frozen). Lots of good fish gets frozen right on the boat, including almost all of the wild salmon sold from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

If buying fresh or previously frozen salmon at the fish counter, look for salmon with firm flesh that is glistening and doesn’t show impressions from fingerprints or any tearing. The flesh should appear firm and should not smell overtly “fishy”—it should smell briny at most. You can also buy frozen salmon and thaw it yourself in the fridge just before curing. When choosing frozen salmon, use a purveyor you trust, and once it’s thawed, look for the same markers of quality as you would for fresh. (Serious Eats’ associate editorial director, Megan O. Steintrager, swears by the fish from her wild salmon CSA, which she found through the Local Catch Seafood Finder.) 

Beyond the apparent recommendation of using high quality fish, salmon with a higher fat content is ideal for smoking. The flavor of smoke pairs well with the rich flavor of fatty fish (just like with fatty meats) and fat also insulates the meat during its extended dry-heat cooking time to guarantee the fish doesn’t dry out and develop an unpleasant tacky texture when cooked. And the good news is that you have two great options: farm-raised salmon for a delicious smoked salmon that’s relatively affordable and wild king salmon for a deluxe smoked salmon that’s well worth the price if you can swing it. 

Farm-raised Atlantic salmon—the only type of Atlantic salmon you’ll find—has the highest fat content of all salmon types and is a great option in this recipe. I’ll admit, I don’t often sing the praises of farm-raised salmon. It generally has a noticeably duller flavor than its wild counterpart, but its unctuousness makes it great for smoking. Plus farm-raised salmon is readily available throughout the country and it is much more affordable than wild salmon. Seek out high-quality farm-raised salmon from a brick-and-mortar or online purveyor you trust—several of us have had good luck with Wulf’s Fish, just to list one option.

An even better choice is wild king salmon, also known as Chinook salmon. King salmon has a high-fat content, deep red coloring, and extra flaky texture that is ideal for smoking, but it has a limited season when it’s available fresh, especially for those of us who live outside of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, though you can find excellent wild salmon, including king salmon, online from sources that ship throughout the US. Wild sockeye salmon is another popular variety that is less fatty than king salmon, but its balance of leanness and firmer texture holds up well to the smoking process without falling apart. It also tends to be less expensive than king salmon. While I prefer the fattiness and rich flavor of king salmon, sockeye is an excellent choice if you prefer a slightly leaner fish. Truly you can smoke any variety of wild salmon, but some varieties will be less fatty and more prone to drying out while smoking. Ultimately, it comes down to availability and personal preference.

If you do smoke wild salmon, I recommend cooking the salmon to a slightly lower temperature than farmed to lower the risk of the leaner wild fish drying out and losing its more intense flavor—the recipe below reflects this recommendation.

For the Best Texture and Flavor, Dry Brine Your Salmon

Similar to other large cuts of meat like brisket or pork butt, brining the salmon for an extended time is critical to season the fish deeply rather than just on the surface. Brining also gives the fish a firmer, denser texture, which minimizes its risk of falling apart when cooking and makes it more pleasant to eat.

To land on the best brining technique and timing, I tried smoking a few smaller pieces of salmon side by side: one plain without brining as a control, one dry-brined with salt, one dry-brined with equal parts by volume of salt and sugar, one soaked in a salt-and-sugar wet brine, and one soaked in an all-salt wet brine. After I applied each brine, I let the salmon sit in the fridge for a set period of time (more on that below), then rinsed it and allowed it to dry well before smoking.

Without any brine, salmon smoked at the low temperature called for in this recipe tasted more watery and had a mushy texture. Both the wet-brined and dry-brined salmon samples came out with a comparably pleasant, firmer texture. This confirmed what I already knew—that brining the fish is a must. Based on previous testing we’ve done, I know that dry-brining is faster and easier than wet-brining thanks to the fact that there’s no need to transfer a giant tub of water in and out of the refrigerator with dry-brining, so I went with that more practical approach. I also preferred the taste of salmon brined with both salt and sugar rather than salt alone. Once the fish was smoked, the faint sweetness from the sugar in the brine balanced the salty, smoky rich fish. 

With the brining method and ingredients determined, I next tested various brining times, including one hour, three hours, five hours, and seven hours. After tasting the four samples side by side, I decided the best curing time was five hours. When the salmon was left to dry-brine for less time, the fish’s texture was noticeably softer and tasted underseasoned, and when brined for longer than five hours, the final fish tasted too salty.

Why You Need to Let a Dry Tacky, Surface Form on the Fish Before Smoking

Once the fish is properly seasoned and firmed up from dry-brining, we then need to rinse the excess salt and sugar off of the entire fillet to make the fish palatable (it would be way too salty and sweet without this rinsing step). But then we have a wet piece of fish, and if you just chuck it in the smoker while still wet, the smoke will cling to the water and slide off the surface of the fish, which means our fish won’t get that delectable smoky flavor. We need to create a dry, clingy surface that the smoke can adhere to from the start of cooking. One of the most important steps to smoking salmon, whether it’s hot- or cold-smoked, is to dry the salmon to form what is called a pellicle on the skin after dry-brining and rinsing and before smoking. 

The salt and sugar in the dry brine dissolve some of the proteins in the salmon and draw them to the surface, and as water evaporates while the salmon is sitting and drying in the fridge, the proteins bond together to form the sticky film that is the pellicle. The pellicle coating helps smoke adhere to the salmon during cooking. When the fish goes on the grill or smoker, you want it moist enough to capture the flavorful vapors in the smoke but not wet, which would cause the smoke to slide off. I found that a drying time anywhere from five to 24 hours dried out the surface of the salmon just enough to ensure a robust smoke flavor.

Tips for Hot Smoking Salmon

Once the pellicle is formed and the salmon has dried in the fridge, it’s time to pull it out and move on to the main event: the actual smoking! Here are some tips for proper smoking.

Don’t Forget the Wood

Wood is key to getting the wonderful smoky flavor in your fish. Roughly three-inch wood chunks or wood chips will both work well. If you do opt for wood chips, I recommend wrapping them in an aluminum foil packet with cut vents on top to ensure the smaller pieces burn slowly over the course of salmon’s cooking time, and the wood chips don’t burn too quickly before the fish has a chance to absorb the smoke flavor.

Maintain a a Steady Temperature

Whether using a smoker or charcoal or gas grill, make sure to maintain the cooking temperature between 225 to 275°F. At this steady heat level the salmon will have enough time to absorb a robust smoky flavor in the same time it takes to cook through to a final temperature of 120°F for wild salmon and 125°F for farm-raised salmon. 

The easiest way to maintain this heat level with a charcoal grill is to light just a half chimney’s worth of coals and nestle them onto one side of the grill so that the salmon can cook away from the coals on the cooler side of the grill using the indirect heat of the coals. Adding a quart of unlit coals with the lit coals extends the cooking time without raising the internal grill temperature. The unlit coals will slowly ignite over time and continue to heat while some of the initially lit coals begin to die down. It’s a hands-off approach to making sure the grill retains its temperature while the salmon is cooking.

Put Your Salmon in a Sling

Using a greased foil sling makes moving the large fillet on and off the grill easy and minimizes the risk of tearing the fish. With a gorgeous silky smoked fillet, the only question left is if you should serve it warm for family and friends or divide it into pieces and squirrel it away in the refrigerator or freezer just for you to enjoy in the future.