This is just a simple salmon smoke house that I built using some 2x4s and scraps of plywood and a roll of fly screen.

The year before I had used an old cheap tent. It worked, but only once. Between the fire, the smoke, the melted nylon, the dripping, and kids playing around it the tent just barely lasted long enough to finish a batch of salmon strips.

The idea here is that I want to keep the flys off of my fish. I know a lot of people don't mind the eggs and maggots on their fish, but because of my upbringing I just have an irrational aversion to flys laying eggs on my food. So call me squeemish -- whatever!

I think the photos show pretty clearly how I framed it together. It is 4 feet wide and 16 feet long (reduces the amount of cutting on the plywood sheets).

I covered the bottom section with plywood and the top section, but the three middle ones I left open and just covered them with fly screen. This allows the breeze to blow through. Depending on the weather, the strips need to air dry for about 4 to 6 days.

I made a door with a sheet of old plywood and some cheap hinges. It was warped so I added a hanging fly screen inside the door to keep the flys from getting in around the cracks of the door.

My wife cuts the strips. That is a whole other skill level. She learned it from our neighbors when we lived in Nunapitchuk.

That is me on the left pretending to help. We are standing near the river bank and that is the Lewis Angapak Memorial School in Tuntutuliak in the background. The smoke house is barely visible next to the boardwalk up nearer the school.

We mix the strips in a big pot with a mixture of brown sugar and soy sauce and then I hang them on alder sticks that I cut and peeled from the river bank.

My fire container is the bottom of an old drum sitting in the middle on some bricks and a sheet of steel that I found that was big enough to cover the fire container so that there was just enough air getting in to keep the wood smoldering and smoking. It made a lot of smoke and the whole smoke house got very warm, but not hot.

I checked the fire about 4 times a day and kept cutting more wood to keep it going. I used green wood, seemed to work fine. Sometimes I added some dead dry wood to get it going strong again.

After about four days they were done. Very well smoked and totally dry on the outside, but still dripping oil on the inside. We ate a lot right away and then kept the rest in zip lock bags in the freezer for later.

Here is the smoke house closed up during the winter. Note that it was built far enough away from anything flamable that if it caught fire there would be little chance of the fire spreading. In this shot there is a small pond in the summer just 15 feet behind the smoke house.

It worked so well that I fully plan on building another one when we move from Tuntutuliak to Tok.

So if you like salmon strips then build yourself a cold smoker. Feel free to copy from this smoke house page -- just give me due credit.

Frank Cook (April 2009)