Smoked mackerel, bought in the store, sometimes does not meet our expectations. Then it turns out to be too salty, but it is not smoked at all, but boiled in onion husks. If you have a cottage or electric smokehouse, you can smoke mackerel yourself. If not, you too can easily make mackerel as good as a store and much cheaper.

Smoked mackerel in smokehouse
To make real smoked mackerel you will need a smokehouse, which can be made from an iron barrel, and sawdust. Sawdust is suitable for all types of wood except conifers. Alder wood chips are best.
Ice-cream or fresh mackerel gut, wash well and remove the gills. Carefully rub the fish with spices and salt inside and out and put in the fridge for a day. Salt is better to take large.
Put currant leaves and raspberries on the smokehouse grate, fish on them. Instead of leaves are suitable sprigs of apple. Put alder chips, a layer of chips should be a height of 0.5 - 1 cm. Smoke mackerel for 15 - 20 min.

Mackerel in an electro-smokehouse
Wash gutted fish, remove the gills and rub with salt, leave in the refrigerator for two days. One hundred grams of sawdust moisten with water, put on a tray and add a piece of sugar and a few juniper berries on top.
Dry the fish, oil it and put it in a smoke box. You can add a slice of lemon inside. We turn on the oil lamp, in 10 minutes we put a pallet with sawdust. Fish is smoked for 20 minutes, then turn off the oil lamp and leave it closed for 20 minutes.

Cold Smoked Mackerel at Home: Recipe 1
At home, you can cook smoked mackerel much easier. Of course, this will no longer be smoking, but salting with liquid smoke.
Would need:

  • 1 liter of water
  • 2 handfuls onion peel
  • 1.5 tablespoons dry tea
  • 3 tablespoons salt
  • 1.5 tablespoons of sugar.
Add all the listed ingredients to the water, boil for 5 minutes and cool. Gut mackerel, remove the gills, put in a pickle and press down with a load. After a day, put in the refrigerator and keep in brine for another three days. Every day, the fish must be turned.

Cold smoked mackerel at home: Recipe 2
Would need:

  • 1 liter of water
  • 2 handfuls of onion peel
  • 4 tablespoons salt
  • 2 spoons of sugar
  • 100ml of liquid smoke.
Boil water, add husks and cook for 20-25 minutes, cool, strain, add sugar, salt and liquid smoke. Put the gutted fish into the pickle under the load, put in a cool place for two days. Finished fish dry cloth and grease.

Mackerel in aerogrill
If you have a convection oven, you can cook mackerel for an hour.
Gutted fish cut off the head, wash and dry it with a towel. Rub each fish with a teaspoon of salt on the outside and inside, put it in a bag and pour three spoonfuls of smoke into the fish. We shake the package well, so that the smoke dissipates, and leave for half an hour.
After drying the fish with a napkin, we place it on the middle grill of the convection oven for half an hour at a temperature of 205 °. Turn on the fan at medium speed.
Preparing smoked mackerel, do not store it for a long time, it may affect your health.

The smoked product purchased in the store often does not meet our expectations. The fish may be salted or "fake" - cooked not in the smokehouse, but cooked, for color, in onion peel. Such a fake is unlikely to benefit the body, unscrupulous manufacturers often use prohibited methods to hide the perversity or lack of freshness of the original product.

Inexpensive cold smoked mackerel is a good option for cooking. tasty snack   at home. The fish contain no a large number of   small bones, pulp - fat and dense. Cooking recipes in the smokehouse are simple, available to any hostess or owner.

What is cold smoking

This method of cooking fish or meat is more like drying at a low temperature of 25 - 30 degrees. Natural conditions give the dish delicate taste   and light aroma of smoke, this method of preservation is reliable and durable enough. Cold-smoked mackerel is cooked within 24 hours, taking into account the period of pre-soaking in the marinade.

How to prepare the fish

Fresh or frozen mackerel gut, wash, remove the gills. Purified fish salt, for this purpose it is better to use large rock salt. Leave the mackerel for half an hour to soak, if the carcasses are large - for an hour.

Many housewives at the preliminary stage does not use salt, and brine. For its preparation you will need a glass of granulated sugar, a pound of salt, fresh lemon juice, a mixture of ground peppers, garlic, passed through a press. All listed ingredients dilute in four liters of heated water, bring the mixture to a boil, but do not boil. Place the fillet in a slightly cooled brine for several hours or overnight. For further heat treatment, the mackerel carcass must be dried with a plain or paper towel.

Preparation process: time, methods, features

Cold-smoked mackerel at home is cooked in a self-made or store-bought smokehouse, at the bottom of which a layer of sawdust is poured. Any hardwood species will be suitable: oak, apple, alder, cherry. The best option is alder chips, you can also add a few juniper berries and a piece of sugar. Sawdust should smolder so that they do not flare up; they can be sprinkled with water with the aid of a spray gun as necessary.

In the conditions of a country house or cottage, cold-smoked mackerel is prepared on an ordinary bonfire, barbecue, barbecue. Put raw salted carcasses greased with vegetable oil on the grate. Smoke in closed form, the temperature of the smoke should not be more than 40 degrees. For added flavor and aroma, you can put raspberry leaves or currants, apple twigs on the trellis.

Cold-smoked mackerel is prepared for a short time, about half an hour. The time depends on the preliminary stage: if the fish is marinated, the smoking process will go faster. At the end of the process, hold the fish in the cooling smokehouse for another 20 minutes.

Finished carcasses can be stored wrapped in foil, in freezerIn this form, the appetizer may lie more than one month. The calorie content of the workpiece is small, it is 150 kcal per 100 g of the finished product. Natural fish oil is a useful component of such a dish that can not be overestimated.

How to choose the mackerel in the store

Mackerel cold smoked at home will decorate everyday or festive table. It is important to buy fresh productfor this we follow the following criteria:

  • The eyes of the fish should be bright, moist and slightly bulging.
  • Gills - clean, without mucus, have a reddish tint.
  • The smell - fish, but unobtrusive, too smelling fish, most likely, not the first freshness.
  • Scales - elastic, shiny.
  • Buy fish in proven places and reliable, reputable manufacturers.

Simple preparation can significantly save the family budget - finished product   from the store is twice as expensive as fresh frozen.

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The quality of fish on our shelves raises many questions and in order to avoid unpleasant surprises, it is better to cook it yourself at home.

How to choose a mackerel

  “Freshness is only one - the first, but it is also the last. And if the fish is of the second freshness, then this means that it is rotten! ”- wrote Mikhail Bulgakov
  Mackerel, in most cases, on the shelves of stores gets frozen, which allows you to store it for quite some time. So, what should I look for when choosing a mackerel:
  The carcass must be flat, with no visible damage. Do not buy deformed fish that have lost its shape - this means that it has been re-frozen. Fins without damage, eyes pressed to the body are not cloudy, clear and transparent. Yellow spots - oxidation of fish oil - fish is not fresh.

Cold smoked mackerel

  Ingredients:
  Frozen mackerel
  Salt

  The mackerel is slowly thawed; to do this, take the fish out of the freezer and put it on a plate or other suitable container and place it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Thawed fish will need to gut and remove the head. It will be much more convenient if the mackerel has not thawed completely, in such a state it has a firmer consistency, is easier to cut, not crushed and not torn.
  Gently fish rub down with salt and refrigerate for 12 hours. After the time the salt from the fish wash off cold water   and hang by tail to dry in a cool place. Dried fish is placed in the smokehouse. Smoke at a temperature not higher than 25 ° C, in 24 hours our mackerel will be ready.

Hot smoked mackerel

  Ingredients
  Mackerel
  Salt
  Pepper

  The fish is slowly thawed as in the previous recipe. With giblets, take out the gills and wash my mackerel well with cold water. Rub it with a mixture of salt and pepper and refrigerate for 5 hours. Before smoking, dry the fish well, spreading it on a dry napkin.
  For smoking use a handful of chips from alder or fruit trees. Fold the fish in the oil lamp so that it does not touch each other, cover the lid. Smoke over moderate heat for 25-30 minutes.


Smoked Mackerel without Smokehouse

  Ingredients:
  Frozen mackerel 4 pcs
  Black tea in a bag of 2 pieces
  Onion Husk - Handful
  Salt 4 tbsp. l
  Sugar 1.5 tablespoons
  Liquid smoke 1 tbsp
  Water 1 l

While the mackerel is being thawed, we add all the ingredients to the water except “liquid smoke” and cook on low heat for 20-30 minutes. After cooling the liquid, it must be drained and add liquid smoke. Gutted and without heads fish laid in a tray and pour the cooked broth, cover with a lid and put in the refrigerator for three days, turning every day, for even salting. After the time of salting, mackerel need to dry, hanging by the tails for 5-6 hours. To give a brighter color fish can wipe with vegetable oil.


Storage of smoked fish

  After smoking, the fish, for some time, left in a ventilated room or in a draft. Smoked fish is stored in a dry, clean and cool place at a temperature of 2-10 ° C. Cold-smoked fish has a shelf life of up to two weeks and hot-smoked food for 4 to 6 days.
  Wood for smoking mackerel Used for smoking hardwood without bark, as a rule, it is: alder, plum, apple, pear, cherry. The type of wood affects the color of the product. Coniferous wood does not apply, because it has a large number of resins, which give bitterness to the products. Juniper is an exception, but it should be used very carefully and in small quantities.

Harvesting fish in store practiced for centuries. This time was enough to invent a wide variety of ways to extend the product life. One of them is smoking. In the conditions of modern dwellings, it is not always convenient to practice from a practical point of view, and therefore cold-smoked recipes are more common and simple, to which we will devote this material, having analyzed the technology using the example of mackerel.

Cold smoked mackerel in smokehouse

If you have a small automatic smokehouse, then it is perfect for making mackerel. Virtually the entire process will take place without your participation, it will only be necessary to prepare chips and the fish itself.

Before salting the mackerel for cold smoking, it must be cleaned and gutted, then dried thoroughly and after that you should choose your favorite salting method: wet or dry. We decided to pour the mackerel with a concentrated salt solution (80 g of salt per liter of water) and leave it for about 2 hours. Salted mackerel then rinsed and dried, and after that we put it in the smokehouse. Having fallen into the chip compartment, set the timer for a day and select a temperature of 28 degrees. After finishing the smokehouse, remove the cold smoked mackerel and remove the sample.

If you do not have a smokehouse or a desire to mess with real smoke, you can try out a recipe with liquid smoke, a small portion of which can be added to the soaking solution for fish.

Ingredients:

  • mackerel carcass;
  • salt - 45 g;
  • granulated sugar - 20 g;
  • water - 950 ml;
  • tea - 3 sachets;
  •   - 3-4 drops;
  • pair of handfuls of onion peel.

Cooking

Having prepared the fish, that is, gutting it, cutting off the fins and head, then rinsing and drying the carcass, put it in side and hold the solution for "smoking". Bring water to a boil, put onion peel and a few tea bags into it. Leave the solution under the lid to infuse, then strain, mix with salt and sugar, and allow to cool completely. After cooling, drip a little liquid smoke into the marinade, lower the peeled mackerel carcasses and cover the fish with a plate of smaller diameter so that it acts in the manner of the load. Leave the mackerel marinate in the fridge for 3 days, and let it dry completely over time. Mackerel cold smoked at home is ready, rub its skin with a drop of vegetable oil and can be served.

Smoked mackerel is very tasty. But is it necessary to buy it in stores, or can you try to make such an appetizing dish yourself?

Benefit and harm

It is worth starting with useful properties. In general, the fish certainly need to be included in the diet, because it contains a lot of different nutrients: phosphorus, fluorine, zinc, sodium, manganese, sulfur, potassium, unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins PP, A, E and group B.

Mackerel is useful for the brain, cardiovascular system, central nervous system and, in general, the whole organism. It improves brain activity, stimulates protein synthesis, normalizes metabolic processes, protects tissues from premature aging and damage.

By the way, the caloric value of 100 grams of the product is only 220-230 calories, which is not at all a lot.

Now about the harm

Like any smoked fishMackerel contains many carcinogens that can damage tissues and provoke the degeneration of healthy cells, causing cancer.

In addition, if smoked improperly (and it’s not easy to follow all the rules), a part of the pathogenic microorganisms may remain, causing serious poisoning. So to use smoked mackerel too often is not recommended.

How do professionals prepare?

In general, smoking is a smoke treatment. In total there are two ways: hot smoking and cold. In the first case, the fish is treated with hot smoke. Thus, the fillet is subjected to heat treatment, as a result of which all bacteria die.


That is why this method is considered more secure and correct. During cold smoking, the treatment is carried out by the so-called cold smoke, that is, there is essentially no heat exposure. But the fish is well salted, and the ambassador, as you know, also contributes to the destruction of pathogenic microorganisms (if it is done correctly).

How to cook at home?

So, is it possible to cook such a dish as smoked mackerel at home? Yes, and in several ways.

Method one

You can cook mackerel in liquid smoke - a special liquid that gives the fish the aroma and taste of smoking.

You will need:

  • 5 carcasses of mackerel;
  • 100 ml of liquid smoke;
  • 4 tablespoons of salt (with a slide);
  • 1 tablespoon of sugar;
  • 1 liter of water.

Cooking:

  1. First prepare the mackerel. To do this, you need to open the abdomen and remove all the insides. Head and tail do not need to be removed.
  2. Now proceed to the preparation of brine. Pour water into the pot and bring to a boil. Dissolve sugar and salt in it and turn off the heat in a minute. Now add liquid smoke, mix everything well.
  3. Immerse the mackerel in the ready brine, put the press on top. Leave the fish salted and smoked for 2-3 days.
  4. Then remove the carcasses, rinse them in running water, cut into portions and serve to the table.

Using this recipe, you can cook mackerel almost like in a store. But remember that liquid smoke is quite harmful.

Second way


This method is more complicated, but only natural products are used.

List of ingredients:

  • two rather large mackerel;
  • two large handfuls of onion peel;
  • two glasses of water;
  • 2 teaspoons of black tea (or two bags);
  • three tablespoons of salt;
  • tablespoon of sugar;
  • three bay leaves;
  • 10 peas allspice;
  • half a teaspoon ground coriander seeds.

Cooking method:

  1. First you need to prepare the marinade. To do this, pour one and a half cups of water into a saucepan, then put onion peel in the same place. Bring to the boil and cook for about 20 minutes, then leave for another 15 minutes. Strain the broth.
  2. Boil the rest of the water and put the tea in it. Insist on it for 10 minutes, strain it well.
  3. Mix the brew with a decoction of onion peel, add bay leaf, pepper, coriander, salt and sugar. Mix everything thoroughly.
  4. Now prepare the mackerel. The head can be cut off, but this is not necessary. Gut each carcass and wash it under the tap.
  5. Pour the marinade into a shallow container, put mackerel in it, place a load on top (you can put a regular plate) so that the carcasses do not float.
  6. Store the container in a cool place for two or three days. In order to brew the onion peel and decorate the fish evenly in a beautiful golden color, periodically turn over the carcass.
  7. Delicious smoked mackerel is ready!

Third way

This recipe will help prepare a delicious hot smoked mackerel. Here is what you need:

  • two rather large carcasses of mackerel;
  • litere of water;
  • three tablespoons of salt;
  • 1.5 tablespoons of sugar;
  • 10 peas allspice;
  • 3 bay leaves;
  • 2 tablespoons of black leaf tea;
  • 150 grams of rice.

Description of preparation:

  1. Approximately 12 hours before smoking you need to fill the rice with water so that it only slightly covers it. Leave the mixture overnight to allow the rice to completely absorb all the liquid. Then simply mix the rice with one tablespoon of tea. Wrap the entire mixture in foil, leaving a hole (it will be needed to get the smoke out).
  2. Cook the marinade. To do this, boil water, add salt, sugar, pepper and bay leaf. Bake it all together for another minute, then turn off the fire.
  3. Gut and rinse the mackerel in running water well, then immerse it in the marinade, press it down with something and put it in the fridge or in a cool place for a day.
  4. Remove the mackerel and proceed to the hot smoked stage. Take a frying pan, cover its bottom with several layers of foil (you can additionally lubricate it with oil), put rice with tea, wrapped in foil, so that the hole is at the top. Heat the mixture until light smoke begins to flow.
  5. Place the grid in the pan, put the mackerel on it. Cover the pan with a lid.
  6. Save fish on each side for twenty minutes. Cool the finished mackerel and serve.

Enjoy your meal!