We really like the taste of spring salmon, so we dispense with all added ingredients except salt and smoke. We take a 5 gallon plastic bucket, fill it to the appropriate depth with water, put in an egg in the shell, and mix in salt until the egg floats. We cross-cut the filets into strips, and put them into the brine for an hour and a half, then pull them out, rinse them in a colander, and hang them in our outhouse-sized smokehouse overnight on curtain hooks, which we buy by the gross, to form a pellicle.
Then they're cold-smoked for 24 hours or so, using a pan full of very-dry-then-water-soaked alder on a hot plate. Some of the salmon is then dried into jerky, hung in a slow oven with the door open. It keeps for months in the refrigerator. The rest is used fresh. If we wind up with some chum or coho, we might candy it, but never spring.
