When we were in Hawaii in January I bought a local dried fish called Ahi. Its a tuna of some sort that is salted and dried. I heard it referred to as Tuna jerky and Ahi jerky and fish jerky, but the bottom line is, its good. I’m planning to try a recipe using some Lake Trout cut into 1/2″ square strips. The plan is to make a mix of equal parts of sea salt and Morton’s Tenderqwik and rub this into the fish. I’m thinking 2 days in the fridge will be good enough to get a solid cure, then it’ll go into the dehydrator until its as dry as I figure it needs to be. When its done I’ll report back but I am going to wait until we cool off some since the dehydrator will be in the garage.
I dug thru a pile of internet information on the dried Ahi and found quite a number of recipes using all sorts of fish for this process, but figure Lake Trout will have a bit more natural oil in the flesh, similar to the tuna. The dried stuff I ate in Hawaii had a generous amount of oil in the meat yet. I’ve thought maybe of doing the trout this way and if it’s lacking in flavor I can just lay the strips out in the smoker and give it a couple hours of cold smoke to liven it up. And I do plan to split the salt batch and add some sugar to one portion to see if one is better than the other.
Just curious if anyone has tried drying a salted fish product before and what they might have done differently.
