Dave's Smoked Salmon

My brother, upon learning I now have a BGE, sent me his favorite smoked salmon recipe. We gave it a go.

The fish is soaked in a brine with bay leaves and maple syrup overnight. Then the next morning you form a "pellicle" on the fish by drying it in front of a fan for 4 hours.

The fish becomes tacky. The thinner parts looked as if they had been smoked already by the time this step was complete - they were translucent and firm. The fish then went onto the grill. The BGE was easy to dial in at 200F.

The recipe says to baste hourly with maple syrup. It took only three hours to get to the desired internal temp of 145F.

Delicious! We'll do this again when Jake gets home. Thanks Dave!

Notorious BGE

For Father's Day I got a Big Green Egg. I practiced a couple of times, then went whole hog on 13# of pork butt. Here's how it went down.

Started with two pieces of bone-in pork butt. They were dried, coated with mustard, then liberal application of butt rub. Then they went into the fridge overnight.

I loaded the Egg with charcoal and fired it up. My one mistake with the Egg was allowing the temp to get too high at the start. My thermometer did a 360 it got so hot, probably 800F. So it took some time to cool it off. I put them on at about 325F and did 1 hour/pound (about 6 pounds each) at 300F. It is crazy easy to lock in the temp on the Egg. My temp didn't vary more than about 15 degrees for the entire 6 hour smoke.

After about 4 hours I wrapped the pork in foil and let it finish to 200F. I didn't add any charcoal the whole time and when I went back out to cook steaks last night, there was still about half of the charcoal left.

The meat pulled off easily. It had a little less smokiness than I would like, so next time maybe more chips or even a few chunks of wood. But these butts made for a great Saturday supper with Shawn and Suzanne.

Tomato mozzarella salad, apple cole slaw, and pulled pork