Salmon Burnt Ends on the Pit Boss Pellet Grill
by Armadillo Pepper BBQ
I bet you haven't tried these before. If seafood is your thing, you may want to give this recipe a try.
Fulfill your needs of mastering everything burnt ends with this sweet and savory salmon.
And we've made brisket burnt ends. We've made chicken burnt ends wrapped in bacon. Poor man's burnt ends. Even hot dog burnt ends. But today we're going to make some salmon burnt ends.
I first saw this idea done by Over-the-Fire Cooking, and I just haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
We're going to create a brine for the salmon. Brine it overnight 16 to 18 hours. Then, we're gonna get it on this pellet grill, and we're going to put some smoke on it. And before it's all over, we're going to make a sauce. It's going to be awesome!
Let's get over to that brine. I've got a salmon fillet here. We want to cut it about an inch, inch and a half, you decide.
I have removed the skin from the back as you can see. Just cut it as straight as we can. Won't matter you know if it's not perfect.
I think what I'll do for my purposes is we'll cut this salmon fillet into three straight pieces. And this one weighed just a little bit less than three pounds. I don't remember the exact weight, but it was just a little bit less than three pounds.
Now, what we want to do is cut these in say an inch and a half to two inch pieces. Depends on how you think you're going to like your bite sizes. That's what you're after here, a bite size. In fact, where it's fatter here you can see I'm cutting it closer, maybe to an inch. Obviously, I'm just eyeballing it here.
Here I've got in a baggie cup and a half of brown sugar, a quarter cup of kosher salt.
Now, this brine will do three things for you. It'll provide flavor with that brown sugar and the salt, it'll actually help it stay moist during the cooking process.
The other thing the brine will do is it helps prevent that interesting looking white stuff. If you ever cook salmon, that little white stuff starts coming out, albumen. It helps to prevent that from leaching out while you smoke the salmon...
What I've got here is a little Red Clay honey... I always encourage people to use local, your local honey, whatever you can get. This comes out of Georgia not too far from me, and I'm putting roughly two, two and a half, three tablespoons.
Get it good and coated all the salmon pieces. I'm going to put it in the refrigerator and we're going to let it cure for about 12 to 18 hours. You can even go up to 24 hours after brining in the refrigerator for 18 hours.
All I'm going to do at this point is take it out, put it in this strainer, take it inside, and rinse off the outside. You know there could be some salt or sugar laying around it.
Now, we've got this wire rack. After, I've rinsed off our salmon, just put it on this… wireless rack...
Space it out a little bit. Now, by the way, I let that salmon stay in the brine for about 18 hours. You can go up to 24. And I rotated it you know every four to six hours. I mean obviously overnight I didn't rotate it, but just want to make sure that the brine gets evenly dispersed coated over the salmon…
I'll set it inside my refrigerator for a minimum of an hour. One to two hours is what you need.
Now, I've removed the salmon from the fridge. It was in there for an hour and a half. Also, one thing I didn't show on camera is when I put that wire rack in the fridge. Right before I did that, I took some paper towels, patted that salmon dry to get a little bit more of that moisture off of it.
Now, this process of letting the salmon sit in the fridge or outside here in the breeze puts like a lacquer like coating on top of the salmon. It's called a pellicle, and what this pellicle does is… it's you know… it's kind of sticky and it'll help the smoke, you know that smoke flavor adhere to the salmon.
I'm using cherry wood pellets today, which is my personal favorite with salmon...
I've got two sauce options for you. Each one has two tablespoons of butter.
This one has just a little over a tablespoon of gochujang, tablespoon of honey.
This one has tablespoon of sriracha, tablespoon of maple syrup, and a tablespoon of soy sauce.
Just want to heat them up. Melt them. Get everything blended. Doesn't have to be thick for this recipe...
So it's been two hours. What I'm going to do now is do about half of them with that gochujang honey based one, and we'll do the other half obviously with the soy maple syrup sriracha one.
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Okay, I'm going to put this toothpick here. Just so I can sort of mark my line where I have the gochujang versus the sriracha. We'll get the lid down. Let it cook about one more hour.
Hey, it's been three hours twenty minutes. Look at the beautiful color on these, guys.
I'm going to get them off here, and while the salmon is cooling down, we're going to put a little sesame seeds, right. Dress it up.
It's going to help make it look nice. I've got some white ones here, and then I'm going to come back in just a little with some black.
Look if you don't have sesame seeds in the pantry and you want to make this you don't have to buy them both. Just buy the white ones. You can see they give the most contrast. I happen to have both here.
Finish them off with a little cilantro garnish...
We're gonna try the one with the honey and the gochujang first. Not spicy at all. Very mild flavor. Of course, it's a little bit sweet from the brown sugar and the honey. All in all, from a sauce point of view, very mild.
Now, I've got that one that we did with the soy sauce, and I hope you can see that this stuff looks like candy. Tastes like candy by the way.
Okay, you can't go wrong with either one. My personal favorite is the one with the soy…
I've been making salmon for lots of years. Smoking it, grilling it. It goes great with soy. Perhaps I'm just biased from all those years. Don't get me wrong, I would eat either one, but the soy is my favorite.
