We “can” (in glass jars, not metal cans) a lot of salmon for personal use. We use the kippered salmon for sandwich spread, we eat it over rice and we eat it straight out of the jar. Tom and Steve both make their our own kippered (with three smokes) and jarred fish. Tom will sometimes heavily pepper some of the chunks before putting it in the Big Chief Smoker and these chunks go into the smaller jars as snacks (for eating straight from the jar).

We start by cleaning the fish and cutting it into chunks, skin on. Then comes the brine soak for one hour and pat dry. The chunks are smoked (with alder) for three hours, skin side down, in Big Chief Smokers. Then the soft, warm meat is peeled from the skin and the the jars are tightly packed with salmon. We love the fat and leave it on. The process of pressure cooking is long. It takes quite a while to bring the canner (All American model 921) to pressure, and hold it for 90 minutes. Then let it cool down and remove the jars for storage. We wipe the jars down clean (outside) before storage and re-use them year after year, replacing just the lids.