Smoked Salmon Pt. 1

I’ve been thinking of smoking salmon as my first food to smoke in the ProQ. So tonight I went out to buy the required ingredients for a 3-3.5lb filet...
For the rub:
1/4 cup dried Dill
1/4 packed brown sugar
2 tsp coarse kosher or sea salt
2tsp fresh cracked pepper

The directions were to butterfly the filet. At first I thought this was kinda off. I’ve never heard of butterflying a filet before but what do I know about fish? Nothing. I don’t have a filet knife so I used the sharpest knife I had. I didn’t turn out very well.

The next step was to rub the mixture into the butterflied fish, which I did. Place in a large bag and refrigerate over night. This also caught me off guard as Da’Smoker has told me many times the fish needs a pellet (sp?), a brine, basically a tackiness to it so the smoke has something to stick to. The recipe doesn’t mention anywhere to put the rub on the outside. So I call him and he says to leave the rub in the middle and mix together:
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup coarse kosher/sea salt
1T Dill
3 tsp garlic


Apply this mix in the morning, put in the fridge for 2 hours, rinse thoroughly and back in the fridge for a couple hours until there is the tackiness to it it is suppose to have. That sounds more like it...

So the salmon is in the fridge till the morning...

Next Pt. 2