Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon.

Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon. © Ryan Schierling

There are so many brilliant smoked meats in Texas it's a shame that no one really pays much attention to the fishes.


Granted, this is bovine country and the nearest salmon, be it Pacific or (heaven forbid) Atlantic, is an ocean away. Wherever you hail from, there’s always something sacred about cooking with smoke. Brisket is the gold standard by which barbecue joints are judged in the Great Republic, and if you've got a line out the door for beef, then pork ribs and chicken are pretty much a gimme.


Geographically, barbecue in this part of the country has never had a reason to be about the fish. Southern barbecue is beef and pig and yard bird. About the only ocean-sourced thing you’re likely to see on the grates of a Texas smoker are gulf oysters.
 

Salmon has a little less real estate to work with than most things that end up in the smoke. If someone could engineer and farm a salmon the size of a cow, you'd have cheap sides of salmon cluttering up everyone's offset, and apple trees would be shaking in their boots, err... at their roots. But salmon are not the size of cows and they're a little harder to catch than cows, pigs and chickens, so their most delicious parts are at a premium. 

King Ranch Salmon.

King Ranch Smoked Salmon Casserole. © Ryan Schierling

I've been threatening to do this casserole recipe for a while now, and I'm kind of surprised there's nothing like it out there on the whole wide world of internets. Searches for King Ranch Salmon turned up lots of hits for "King Salmon," "Used F-150 King Ranch edition in Salmon, Idaho," and "Carole King's ranch on the Salmon River for sale." The internet – insultingly enough – even asked me "Did you mean King Ranch Chicken?"

King Ranch Chicken is the only casserole that matters in Texas and there are rules. There may be as many subtle individual adaptations and family variations as there are Junior League cookbooks, but most will concur this is a dish best kept simple – with shredded chicken, cans of cream of this-or-that soups and Ro*Tel®, corn tortillas and a ton of cheese. 

This, however, is not King Ranch Chicken.

There is no condensed soup, no Cheese Whiz, no crushed-up nacho-flavored tortilla chips or tins of tomato and green chile. There is no chicken. This is the king of Texas casseroles meets the king of all cold-water fish. It is SXNW. It is smoky, creamy, rich, and as satisfying as comfort food gets. Great Republic purists will inevitably call this just another sensationalist bastardization of a classic Texas dish, but they can go put a sockeye in it. 

This is my King Ranch Salmon.