SHFT Smoked Alaskan Salmon Recipe
Grid down means no electricity. No electricity means no freezer for long term food storage. Get it? SHTF means possible starvation in less than a week unless you know how to preserve food to be kept at room temperatures.
What’s that you say? Oh, you have a room full of canned goods and dried meals? Have you ever tried to live on those dried meals? If you haven’t then I suggest you do. Yes, store bought dried meals will keep you alive. After about a week, you might choose death over eating another one of those. Have you ever considered how vulnerable your food cache is?
My point here folks is that reality smacks us dead in the face with this fact: Food stores have limited value due to quality of the food and vulnerability. Your better chance for survival is your knowledge and skills. In this case, your knowledge of how to acquire and preserve fresh foods from mother earth, not mother grocery store.
Smoked, cured, canned, preserved meats and vegetables is an ancient practice. This process for storing food to be consumed at a later date was used for tens of thousands of years. It is only within the last century that humans began to use reliable electrical grids to power up freezers to store food. Your great grand parents, and mine, knew and cared nothing about deep freezers full of Ziploc bags stuffed with various frozen items. It is far more likely that the “old folks” preferred their personally preserved food even if they did have access to full stocked grocery stores. 
The Native peoples of Alaska perfected the preserving of fish long ago. That tradition lives on today. When done correctly, the end result is a room full of fresh, healthy, wild and tasty treats. My SHTF Alaskan Salmon Recipe is more of a process and not a recipe. Let’s clarify a couple of things. I am a white boy, a Gringo for you Southwestern folks. I recently moved to Alaska and knew much about nothing. I started from ground zero. If I can do it then so can you.
Here is a summary of the step by step process:
Filet the salmon and remove bones.
Brine salmon for 12 hours.
Rinse salmon and let air dry for four hours.
Smoke salmon for 12 hours.
These basic steps are more important than you may realize. Skip one step and you just might ruin an entire batch of fish. That batch of fish might be worth $100 or more on the open market. For example: I once forgot to rinse the fish after the brine process. The end result was a smoked fish so salty that it made your mouth pucker!
If you do not know how to filet a fish then google or youtube it. A brine is a salt, sugar, spice, and water mixture used to help cure the fish and prepare for smoking. The brine removes some of the water from the fish while seasoning for flavor. Keep it simple. Good brines can be found at the grocery store or Wal-Mart.
Here is a basic brine concept:
One cup brown sugar.
One half cut kosher salt.
Six cups of water.
5 pounds of fish.
The smoking process is most challenging. Low and slow is the game. You must not allow the heat in your smoker to go above 130 degrees F. Too much heat cooks your fish instead of smoking and preserving. My preference is pecan wood for smoking. Another popular choice is alder wood. Remember that there is such a thing as too much smoke. The customary practice is to provide wood smoke for the first four to six hours then only low heat for the rest of the time. For extra flavor, finish your smoked fish by basting the fish with honey and letting it dry. The end result is a dark red, smoked fish that shines from the glaze of honey.