Quarantine Cooking: Smoked Salmon & Tofu

Photo by Patrick Jones. Smoked Salmon & Tofu. 14 Jun 2020.

Yesterday we cooked up another feast on the grill, I made smoked salmon and smoked tofu with Chef Roy Choi seasoning, with asparagus wrapped in prosciutto and au gratin potatoes. I followed the Traeger smoked salmon recipe, with skin-on salmon from our local Aldi and extra firm tofu sliced into four equal pieces for our daughter. This is about as easy a recipe to cook as can be done with the grill.

I put olive oil on the skin-side of the salmon and sprinkled a generous covering of Chef Roy Choi's "A Pinch of LA" Koreatown seasoning rub. This was a 2017 collaboration with Williams Sonoma and I was able to purchase four cans of the seasoning before the pandemic hit. It is our favorite rub for smoked salmon & tofu. I let the seasoning cure on the meat for several hours before starting the grill.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Seasoning the tofu.

I set the grill to 250, which is a little hotter than the recipe, but my grill works better at a hotter temperature than too low. The meat was on the grill for almost four hours, and I don't flip it. I added the tofu to the side at the two-hour mark, making up for a mistake the last time I made smoked tofu I cooked it too long (more than four hours is too long).

Photo by Patrick Jones. Asparagus wrapped in prosciutto.

While the grill was going, we made the sides and Allison also made challah bread following a recipe in the Bread Baker's Apprentice, and the asparagus recipe from Mimi Thorisson's A Kitchen in France.

I've been labeling this series "Quarantine Cooking", but we were released from shelter-in-place several weeks ago and Northern Virginia moved into Phase 2 last Friday. On Friday we also made a repeat of the tequila lime chicken on the grill for some friends for our first socially distanced dinner at home with someone other than family. Capturing our home cooking during the stay at home order has been a fun way to make some memories from this extraordinary time. I'll probably give these posts a new name going forward.