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Salmon candy has become my new favorite road food. Sweet, smoky, meaty, fatty. And while it looks like regular smoked salmon, it’s not. So what on earth is candied salmon?
Well, I first heard about candied salmon decades ago, when it was called squaw candy, but it’s no longer called that for obvious reasons. Salmon candy is basically heavily smoked strips of salmon, originally smoked so long they were basically salmon jerky. Nowadays it’s usually lacquered with something sweet, such as brown sugar, maple or birch syrup, or even molasses. The idea is to combine fatty-savory-smoky-sweet in one bite.
Strips from the belly of the salmon are best, but regular fillet strips are good, too — and you can do this to salmon collars as well.
Don’t get me wrong: I love my recipe for smoked salmon. I really do. But it’s for large pieces of salmon, meant to be eaten as a meal, or crumbled into salads or whatever. It isn’t something you can wrap in a paper towel, stick in your pocket and carry with you when you are picking blueberries or wandering around, or maybe fishing for more salmon.
For that you need to change things up a bit. First is the dry cure. My regular smoked salmon uses a brine cure, which keeps the fish supple and moist. Salmon candy needs to be heavily cured and heavily smoked to keep in less-than-ideal conditions.
While it isn’t strictly jerky, although if you want to make a true salmon jerky this is my recipe, the heavy cure and smoke has let me carry salmon candy on multi-day road trips and on fishing boats with a minimal amount of refrigeration.
How minimal? I’ve eaten it at room temperature after it had been in my pack while fishing all day, or in the late afternoon on a long drive. But I fish in cool places, so the salmon probably never got about 65°F. I wouldn’t let it get actually hot and eat it.
Remember, this is an Alaskan invention and it rarely gets hot in Alaska.
If you want something truly hardy, you will need to cut the strips thinner and smoke them harder to get them jerky-like.
What salmon to use? Well, any, really. This is a great use of chum or pink salmon, and it is also excellent with large trout or char. If you want to order salmon from Alaska, try Yakobi Fisheries — I have fished commercially with them and can highly recommend their fish.
Consider my candied salmon a hybrid, hardier than regular smoked salmon, and not quite as austere as the traditional salmon candy made by the native Alaskans. Whatever you call it, it’s damn good.
Smoked Salmon Candy
Ingredients
- 5 pounds skin-on salmon pieces, cut into 1- to 2-inch thick strips
- 1 pound kosher salt
- 1 pound brown sugar
- 1 cup maple syrup or birch syrup
Instructions
- Mix the salt and brown sugar together. Find a lidded container large enough to hold the salmon; a big plastic tub works well. Lay down a layer of the salt/sugar mixture about 1/4 inch deep. Put a layer of salmon down on this, skin side up. Cover the salmon with more salt/sugar mixture. If you need a second layer of salmon, make sure the layer of salt and sugar between them is thick enough so that the pieces of salmon are not touching. Basically you are burying the salmon in salt and sugar. Cover and let cure in the fridge at least 30 minutes, and up to 3 hours. The longer the cure the saltier it will be; I cure for 2 hours.
- Remove the salmon from the cure, which will get wet, and briefly rinse the fish under cold water. Pat dry with a paper towel and set the salmon on a drying rack skin side down. Let this dry in a breezy place for 2 hours, or in the fridge, uncovered, overnight. I put the racks under a ceiling fan near an open window with another fan blowing at the fish from the side. You are doing this to form a pellicle on the salmon, which helps it smoke properly. Don't skip this step!
- Traditionally salmon candy is cold smoked for several days. If you can do this, go for it. Regardless, you want to bring the temperature up gradually over the course of an hour or so and let it sit at around 165°F to 200°F for at least 3 hours, and up to 6 hours if you like your salmon candy harder and smokier.
- Every 90 minutes to 2 hours, paint the salmon with the maple syrup. This also helps to remove any albumen -- the icky white stuff -- that can form between the fish flakes if your smoker gets a little too hot too fast.
- When the salmon looks good and lacquered, typically about 3 to 4 hours, remove it to the drying racks again and paint it one last time with the maple syrup. Allow to cool to room temperature before storing. Salmon candy will last a week in the fridge, longer if vacuum sealed. It freezes well, too.
Notes
Tips
Smoke likes Fat. Smoke adheres better to fat than lean meat, so bellies and collars are better for this. Vary the thickness. Very thin strips will dry harder and be more like jerky... and will keep longer. I eat mine fairly quickly, so I leave the strips thicker, at about 2 inches wide.Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
I have used this recipe for years and it’s perfect. I’m an avid mushroom forager, and a few years ago I discovered this recipe pairs awesome with a candy cap mushroom simple syrup as the glaze. I dehydrate my candy caps for preservation then rehydrate them for various recipes. When I rehydrate, I save the water and make a simple syrup. It is similar in flavor to maple syrup. It’s a versatile ingredient for cocktails, desserts, and this salmon candy recipe, and anyone you share it with will be flabbergasted that the sweet, maple flavor is from mushrooms. Thanks for all the great recipes Hank!
Best recipe I’ve used so far! easy to modify after your first batch, from there it only gets better. One thing I do is go skinless when using fresh wild caught salmon. It gets smoke from all sides. Either way you can’t go wrong!
Also (I almost forgot) I use 2 cups sugar to 1 1/2 cups salt ratio to tame the saltiness, I may even try 2 cups sugar to 1 cup salt. It’s an easy recipe to modify. And YES, use the cheapest cuts of fish until you master your recipe. My go to fish is wild caught Atlantic Salmon. I’m lucky enough to have the west side market near me and they have very good fish vendor.
Passed a bag of salmon candy around to my friends while enjoying a campfire and drinking adult beverages. One of the guys asked “is this a Hank Shaw recipe?” I smiled and replied “of course it is.”
Careful!!!! Best recipe for kids, but….
Its not 50:50 salt:sugar. I mean it is, but its by weight, not volume! Don’t use one cup salt:1 cup sugar or it’ll be too salty. Use a scale to measure even weights. I wish the recipe would update for this as I failed at first til I reread the process. Sugar weighs less per cup than salt.
Great Tasting
As someone who makes this based off of.this, other recipes and intuition at this point, all the time, my only two tips are this: I use cheap, farmed Walmart salmon because it seems to just turn out better, and “Atlantic salmon” is an intentional mislabeling for farmed salmon. Anything wild will 100% advertise it as such, and that’s what’s best for general salmon dishes. So get that cheap Atlantic salmon at Walmart and at least practice with that before dishing out the extra cash for wild caught, at the very least. Oh, and cut those strips about 1″ thick, at most. Thicker cuts tend to not brine properly and sometimes turn out more like just regular smoked salmon, and that’s definitely not what we’re aiming for here.
Shoot, I guess I have more tips than just two! I don’t worry about the sugar/salt ratio too much because after a 4 or so hours, I transfer the salmon to another dish, dumping the brine mixture back over the strips, leaving most of the salt because most of it is still in rock form. That way the salmon is mostly sucking up sugars at that point.
My quest has been to recreate the smoked salmon strips my dad would get us in the 80s and 90s in Ballard, Washington. I think I’ve overshot this goal at this point as those were not candied. Anyhow, I hope my ramble helps anyone making this most awesome treat!
Is it possible to do this in the oven I don’t have a smoker it’s on the list thank you
Too salty. That’s my comment on this websites salmon candy recipe. I followed the instructions to the T ; 2 hour dry brine with 50/50 kosher salt ( the brand Hank uses ) and brown sugar, with maple syrup basting. I think a shorter brine time and maybe a more sugar ratio 60/40 would help. Gonna try that next time
pete, i always do a 3 part sugar, one part salt. i agree, a 50/50 is too much.
Its not 50/50 salt to sugar. Its 1lbs of salt to 1lbs of sugar. Sugar weighs less than salt so if you used one cup sugar and 1 cup salt, it would be way too salty! Took my a few times to realize this.
Do you flip the chunks or just smoke skin side down?
Derrek: I smoke skin side down. I do not flip.
Smaller portion recipe please
tasha, i am doing a small batch of bellies today, about 2 pounds. i used 3/4 cup sugar and a 1/4 cup sea salt. i put the bellies meat side up to cover the bottom of the container. i then covered those with the sugar/salt mix and saved a bit. i put the rest of the bellies meat side down and covered with the rest of the mix. just let it chill overnight. hope this helps!
How do I get my salmon candy to be sweet? Mine was not sweet like I get in the fish markets. I followed this recipe.
Sincerely
Stephany
Stephany: Just keep painting on the syrup or honey. I don’t like my salmon overly sweet, so I only paint twice or maybe three times. You can do it more often to get the salmon sweeter.
Great recipe. Everyone loves my(yours) candied salmon.
I don’t have a smoker so what would a good small starter smoker be? Any ideas would be great
You could buy a smoke tube, look them up on Amazon, and use a cardboard box to cold smoke them in for as long as you’d like. Then just finish it off with the maple syrup and heat in your oven, which should go lower than 200°F.
Looks good! Excited to try it. Just got a Traeger.
Thank you!
Marco