Smoke on the Water

Good Book!

This morning, I climbed out of bed and as I pulled yesterday’s shirt over my head, I inhaled deeply the smell of smoked salmon. It was a good day. The smell of wood smoke has always been my favorite scent, whether it lingered in my hair after an evening campfire in the fall, or entered my classroom on the coat of a student, just returning from a spring sugarbush outing.

This morning’s musky aroma surrounded me as I drank my coffee and settled in to finish a book I’d been reading, True North, set in the Alaskan bush. The heavy scent hung in the air like a warm coat, easing the chill in the cabin caused by the fall breeze wafting through an all-night open window over the kitchen sink while I carefully labeled and stacked the dozen pints of freshly canned, smoked salmon from the night before.

My fishermen!

Putting up food for winter is a hefty endeavor out here in the last frontier. Thanks to the kitchen staff at the Unalakleet River Lodge, young men from the Lower 48 who love to fish in their chest waders standing in the River during their few precious hours off, I’ve got nine Silver Salmon, cleaned, filleted, and frozen, waiting for me to process and put away for winter. My Big Chief smoker will only hold three fish at a time - however, three of these huge fish make 12 pints when dried, smoked, and canned. That’s plenty for the two of us, with some leftover to share. Of course, I think I probably ate half of a fish yesterday, during and after they smoked! To me, the taste is better than chocolate!

It started with an overnight Teriyaki brine. After cutting the sweet, red meat into half-inch strips and three-inch fillets, removing the pinbones with needle-nosed plyers, into the washtub they go. This was my first time to smoke and can salmon by myself. After trying Gregg’s old fillet knife and my new “cheapo” ulu, I settled on the trusty chef’s knife from the block on the counter as the most efficient way to cut up the fish. The skin on a ten-pound salmon is thick and tough. Anything less than the sharpest knife in the house just won’t cut it cleanly, and I certainly didn’t want to make a mess of this fleshy, red gold on my counter. Some of the meat wasn’t completely thawed even after sitting out overnight, and I discovered that these partially frozen pieces were much easier to cut, and I made a mental note for next time.

Teriyaki Brine Recipe (for 20 lbs of fish)
2 cups Bragg’s or soy sauce (I use Bragg’s.)
8 cups water (I used rain water.)
½ cup sea salt (Don’t use the salt with iodine added.)
2 Tbsp chopped garlic
1 cup brown sugar

Big Chief, full up!

The next morning, after a 15-hour soak, I patted dry each piece of salmon with paper towels, and laid them out on my four mismatched, smoker racks. One of my racks is made from two smaller, grill racks that I “tied” together with paperclips and those needle-nosed pliers. It works like a charm! Drying and racking the salmon took me over an hour! Then, out to the smoker, after covering the drip pan with a fresh piece of aluminum foil. I had some Hickory chips left over from last year that I had put in a bowl to soak in water the night before went into the chip tray. My metal smoker is concealed inside a plywood box with a hinged door, to help keep more smoke inside. The only thing I don’t like about my smoker, other than it being too small, is that it’s electric, so I have to plug it into the generator and deal with that noise for 10 hours. But, it is what it is. Meanwhile I head down 40-some steps to where the three, full, gas cans sit on the grass near the boat launch. Time to haul those up for use in the generator.

Within 10 minutes, smoke is pouring out of the upper seam of the plywood box. Success! For the rest of the day, every hour and a half, I have to go out and dump the ashes out of the chip tray and refill it with new wet wood chips. At the six-hour mark, I took the door off of the inner smoker to take a look. The thin strips were getting nice and brown and the fillets had that beautiful, oily moisture bubbling to the surface. At eight-hours, I removed all of the fillets. The flavor was perfect and I wanted them to stay nice and soft, while I left the strips in for a couple of more hours to continue to dry and smoke until almost the color and texture of jerky. When all was finished, around 8pm, I brought the fish inside to can.

Smoked Salmon for dinner, of course!

While the salmon had been smoking, I boiled my pint jars and lids in rain water to sterilize them, questioning whether or not the orange film of pollen on top of the water was going to cause any problems. Oh well, I figured that the pollen was also sterilized by now, and chuckled to myself. I have a beautiful, 25-quart, pressure cooker/canner that Gregg gave to me over a year ago, but all I’ve used it for so far was for processing jars in a hot water bath. This was to be the first time I used the pressure canner part of it. After packing the salmon into the hot jars and making sure the lids were on tight, I set them in the canner, ready and waiting with 16 cups of water already inside. My canner has an additional rack so that I can stack jars in it, so, with eight pint jars on the first rack and four more on the top rack, it was ready to go. With our propane burner on high, it took a good 15 minutes for the canner to get up to 10 pounds of pressure, which was where it needed to stay for 110 minutes for safely canned salmon. After that, it took another 15 minutes or so to cool down to the point where I could remove the pressure canner lid. The smell of smoked salmon immediately filled the cabin. Being that it was almost 11pm, Gregg was already in bed upstairs, but even he called down about the intoxicating smell.

As I removed the jars, one by one, I could see the salmon oil still boiling inside each one. Left on a towel on the counter to cool overnight, the sight of them this morning reminds me of all the work it took to get those 12 jars, and as I step out on the porch, the fog hovering on the river is reminiscent of yesterday’s smoke. A deep breath brings the slightest tang of that deliciousness that now sits safely in the back of my pantry, and I smile as I begin my day.

Mermaid Tears

Since glass has been around for 4,000 years, sea glass has been around for at least 3,980. Generally, it takes 20 to 40 years for glass to become the frosty, chemically, and physically weathered gems that are found on the beach.

Ocean currents from around the world make their way to the 6,640 miles of shoreline that make up Alaska, meaning that the sea glass found here could be from anywhere in the world.

However, my favorite story includes Wyatt Earp, who came to Alaska in 1898, the year before gold was first discovered in Nome. Wyatt soon opened the biggest saloon in Nome, which was a more profitable business than gold prospecting. Back in the day, most trash was simply dumped out at sea, meaning tons of glass bottles and jars ended up in the bottom of the ocean. That glass broke down, and continues to break down, before ending up on beaches along the west coast of Alaska, including Unalakleet.

Within a year of Wyatt’s Dexter Saloon opening, up to four ships left Seattle everyday, headed up the coast to Nome. These ships were often loaded with as many as 700 people, tons of general merchandise and mining machinery, dismantled theatres, hotels, and restaurants, all bound for the west coast of Alaska to set up an “instant city” in the small fishing village of Nome. Again, glass bottles were thrown overboard to lighten the load along the way.

Being that the waters around Nome were, and still are, too shallow for ships and docks, the steamers carrying the passengers were met by smaller boats that transported them and the cargo to 30 feet from shore, where the women and cargo were carried by the men, who waded through the surf. It was quite a production!

Meanwhile, another story passed by word of mouth is that Wyatt also had a floating saloon of sorts that traveled across the Norton Sound, between Nome and St. Michael. Every empty beer and whiskey bottle was thrown overboard and it is that boat from which most of the Norton Sound sea glass comes. However, I have been unable to find any written documentation of any such occurrence.

Finally, there is a legend as old as time that when a sailor drowns at sea, the Mermaids cry, and their tears wash up on shore as colored glass

One thing is for sure; the possibilities are endless as to the history surrounding these pieces of glass, tossed around in the Bering Sea for generations. The mysteries of the surf will remain just that. 

 A friend of mine spends many hours walking her dog on the shores of the Norton Sound. She creates these beautiful earrings out of the glass treasures she finds on these adventurous outings. Combined with Swarovski Crystals and semi-precious gemstones such as turquoise, quartz, and colored agates, these Bering Sea glass earrings are a truly unique and valuable piece of jewelry, custom made in Unalakleet, Alaska.