I don’t tend to eat much fish, but in the supermarket earlier I saw some smoked salmon which didn’t need cooking, and some salmon fillets which did. They looked the same really - both ‘raw’. I decided to buy some of the fillet. It was nice, but a very different flavour from when I’ve tried smoked salmon in the past. The cooked fillet was quite chicken-y with a slight earthy/fishy taste, whereas smoked salmon has a very strong fish flavour.
Why do they taste so different? And why is smoked salmon safe to eat without cooking when other smoked fish do need cooking?
I didn’t realise how complex this was! So with hot smoked salmon, the temperature is hot enough to kill bacteria but not denature the protein (so it still looks ‘raw’). Cold smoked doesn’t cook the fish but imparts the smoky flavour, and it’s made safe to eat by other preservation methods? (as per @[email protected]’s comment)
Well, smoking is a wide variety of processes and very food dependent, but hot smoked food is usually cooked. For example, if you buy Alaskan smoked salmon, they look cooked and a bit jerky like; similarly, for Texas style smoked briskets, the meat is cooked slowly over a couple of hours inside a smoker.
Maybe it would be easier to watch a video on cold smoked salmon to see how the process works.
Yes, @[email protected] is correct (sorry, I haven’t figured out yet how to link usernames). Hot smoked food usually doesn’t keep for more than a few days, if that, because it is cooked. AFAIK, in cold smoking, the smoke itself even has a preserving effect because it kills surface bacteria and dehydrates the outer crust, but the fish is also salted or brined. As noted in other comments, there are a wide variety of different techniques. Note: I’m not an expert, so I may be off on the details. I just used to work next door to a smokery and chatted with the owners sometimes.
Oh don’t worry, you did it right!