Excellent smoked fish from ordinary charcoal grill

First, you have to catch your fish, like what my nephew and I did at Lake Amador.

Then start processing the fish. This technique here does not involve any soaking and uses very little ingredients, and there is no need to waste away many ingredients as is done with soak method. It is very quick and still can rival the smoked fish made traditionally using sophisticated techniques.

After cleaning the fish,  butterfly them and rub some sweet ginger tea powder and rock salt to the exposed flesh, sprinkle a little bit of rosemary herb, and the mesquite powder mix.  Be creative, you can make your own powder rub recipes at this step.  A simple brown sugar, pineapple juice concentrate and rock salt will produce excellent tasting smoked fish, especially for kokanee salmon.

Close the butterfly cut, and wrap each fish with saran wrap and then stash in the fridge while you convert the charcoal grill into a smoker.

Here's how I convert my charcoal grill into a smoker.

I light up the coals over a stove, or however you start to make glowing coals.

Then I clean up the grills and rub some grape seed oil on them to prevent the smoked fish from sticking.  One thing nice about grape seed oil is that they will seldom burn in a smoker. So they are ideal as to make my grill non-stick.

I use citrus stems, cut down to 1 1/2 inches long. I save my citrus stems when I prune. If you don't have citrus stems, you can get them when your neighbor prunes their citruses.

Remove the leaves and cut them up, place in ziploc bags and store in freezer when needed, this way you don't need to rehydrate them when you need citrus chips making smoked fish. Citrus chips is one of the best to use when making smoked fish.

Spread the citrus stems evenly over the charcoal. Wrap some of the citrus stems in alum foil with open ends. This will prolong the supply of citrus smoke.

Then cover completely the hot coals and the citrus stems with alum foil over it to prevent direct radiation from the coals to the fish. We want the smoke to cook the fish, not the coals.  Then place the metal grills that were coated with grape seed oil.

What I would do, before I start the smoking, I would cut out aluminum foil that would completely cover the coal, so that this step is quicker when you have the pre-cut foil in hand.

Then spread your butterflied fish on the grill, making sure to have spaces in between for smoke to go thru. 

Shown below are fish arranged for smoking over an ordinary BBQ grill.

Then close the grill completely. Since the coals are very hot, close all the vents, the intake and the chimney, later on, as smoke starts to come out, open very slightly, to about 5-10% opening depending upon how tightly sealed is your BBQ grill. Some BBQ grills have leaks and vents that you cannot completely close, so there is no need to adjust the vents, just keep them completely close just in case.

The best part comes next,  just wait it out for 1.5 - 2 hours. Clean the yard, mow the lawn, prune the trees, clean-up your fishing gears...

After 1.5 - 2 hours, prepare to harvest the product of your labor. I love using wax paper to wrap the smoked fish.

This is after a couple of hours smoking. It developed nice caramel colors and very juicy.

You can serve this hot, they are so good!

But we let them cool off. We liked to eat our smoked fish chilled instead of hot because the flavors come out.

My friends swear that my smoked fish tasted better than the most expensive smoked fish that they have bought from CostCo and elsewhere.  And most of all, I control the amount of salt in my smoked fish which makes it truly healthy for me.


Enjoy!!!

Nicely done, Joe.  You get my vote fro the best report this month.  Oh, call me next time so I can taste some of your smoked fish.    Hot or cold, it doesn't matter to me.

Looks pretty real to me JoeReal!

After reading your post, I was soooo hungry and wanted to have some fried rice with plenty of garlic and your JoeReal Smoked Fish. 

Like what Raydon said, if you're ready for a taste test, give us a call.

Thanks for the awesome and very detailed report.

You're welcome Raydon and Superd270!  Next time I smoke fish, I will invite you over.

And I make the perfect wines to match the fish! You should come and taste some of my wines even if there's no fish.

Thanks for posting, I totally want to try this!  I have salmon and Mackinaw in my freezer that's waiting to be smoked.  This sounds much faster than going the traditional brine/cold smoke method I normally use.  Time to try something different.

The only obstacle I see for me is finding citrus stems.  Nobody has citrus trees up here due to the climate.  Would you recommend an alternative to the citrus stems if they're unavailable?  Would green alder stems work?