Well, here's a picture of my first smoke, and it is delicious! A beautiful filet of steelhead salmon (from Costco), cut into two pieces to fit in the smoker. Rather than try a low-temp smoke, I set the thermostat to 225º and cooked to an internal temperature of 140º. I used a Maverick 732 to monitor the oven and fish temp.
For those that are interested, the smoke started to appear at the upper vent hole at about 125º. It means that that the wood ignites at a pretty low temp. I used one medium chunk of apple and one half-burned hickory stick that came with the smoker. The hickory stick was left over from the initial seasoning of the #2 that I did the day before. These two woods produced more than enough smoke. Any more would have overpowered the salmon.
The oven got away from me a bit. Even though it was set to 225º, it went up to 250º before I caught it. Now I know that it needs to be set a bit lower to achieve my desired temp. This smoker is obviously very well sealed so heat doesn't escape too easily! I had the shelf on the top shelf bracket that was second from the top, so knowing that heat rises may also may have had some effect on the temperature.
The taste was superb! It had a distinct but mild, smokey flavor that didn't overpower the flavor of the steelhead. While I would have prefered to get this out of the smoker at 140º, the internal temp jumped to 145º because of the jump in temperature of the oven. Nonetheless, it was damn close to medium rare, which is what I shoot for. That means the middle of the thickest part is just cooked.
We had half of the salmon for dinner (no leftovers) and the rest I made into a salmon salad for an appetizer for dinner tomorrow. We're having people over and it will be my first cook with baby backs!
Once I get the hang of controlling the temperature more accurately, I am convinced that I'll be able to do slower smoking of fish (bluefish, mackerel, kingfish, lake trout) with a deep, smokey flavor.
Stay tuned! I'll report back tomorrow with the results of the baby backs!
