Today we’re fishing the White River at Branson, Missouri, but this month I’m also going to Cuba. I’ll stay and eat in Cuban homes, and talk to Cubans—I know how to ask where the library is in Spanish–but I’ll also fish for bonefish. And tarpon. And permit.
If you haven’t kept up, it got easier for Americans to travel to Cuba under President Obama, and then as one of his final acts, Mr. Trump reimposed Cuba travel restrictions. Some folks think that reimposing restrictions was a callously political act to drum up Cuban conservative support in Florida, but I can’t imagine that any politician could be so self-serving.
Kris isn’t going. I explained to her that Cuba was almost an American state once, before the Civil War. She didn’t care, there’s no star for Cuba on our flag, even if Yuli Gurriel and Yordan Álvarez are two of her favorite baseball players, and going to Cuba gets us no closer to our goal of all 50 states. I’m on my own.
There are forms to fill out, and questions to be answered. Most of all though, you have to prepare your kit. You can’t depend on having anything ready to hand when you get there. You can’t go to the fly shop for some flies, or tippet, or to replace anything that breaks. You can’t even go to the drug store for aspirin. You have to haul everything there, except for black beans and rice, rum, and cigars. I guess I’ll be living on black beans and rice, rum, and cigars. Dang.
Cuban food is kind of bland though, so I’m taking a bottle of hot sauce. You can’t be too prepared.
From top to bottom, that’s a fuzzy yellowish bonefish fly, and a fuzzy shiny bonefish fly.
Anyway, I’ve been tying lots of flies for Cuba, and it occurred to me that while it’s considered bad form to add scent to flies–you can’t in good conscience dab a bit of stink bait behind a fly’s ears–there is at least one scent I wouldn’t have to add, exactly. I’d just have to get the fly into the correct vicinity.
What could be better than barbecued flies?
As you know, every Texan is born smoking meat. Even if you’re a vegetarian Texan, you’re born smoking tofu. To preserve my cultural heritage I have to smoke at least 10 pounds of brisket every week, and at least a few racks of ribs and some sausage. Only then can I go to the gun range. Why not bring my fly-tying and smoking together?
My first smoked flies were bonefish flies smoked with bacon. I used hickory as the wood. I cured the bacon for 10 days, in a dredge of salt, brown sugar, sodium nitrite, and maple syrup, then brought the internal temperature up to 145 or so. The bacon is delicious. I’m sure the bonefish will find the flies equally tasty.
From top to bottom, that’s a fuzzy brown bonefish fly, and a fuzzy pink bonefish fly, both now flavored with hickory and bacon!
After the bonefish flies, I figured I needed some big flies for tarpon, and that means big meat, and that means brisket. There’s nothing better than smoked brisket, and Texans learn to smoke brisket before they learn how to vote Republican.
I perfected my brisket cooking at Camp Brisket at Texas A&M. Here is everything I know about cooking brisket:
- The single most important factor in good brisket is the grade of meat. Prime wins every time, and Costco carries good prime briskets. Wagyu doesn’t seem to hold up under the long cook, and choice is just a bit tough.
- Hickory is the favorite wood for brisket, with pecan a close second, and then oak. Surprisingly, despite its bad rep among aficionados, mesquite is pretty good too.
- Trim the fat cap down to about a quarter-inch. Apparently it doesn’t add any moisture to leave it on, and it retards absorption of the seasoning. Plus there’s a lot of fat on a brisket, and a one inch fat cap is kind of disgusting.
- À la Louie Mueller, the seasoning of choice for brisket is half salt and half pepper. I think it takes about a cup, so half a cup of salt, and half a cup of pepper. I put on the seasoning, then let the brisket sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours.
- The smoker temperature must be low: 200, 225, 250. It will take about 12 hours to cook a 12-pound brisket. If you’re serving brisket at 3 pm, plan to start cooking about 1 am.
- The meat stops taking smoke flavor around 145 degrees. You could finish the brisket in the oven after that, and it probably wouldn’t change the flavor, but that would be wrong. It’s not smoked brisket if it’s cooked in the oven.
- The smoke ring has nothing to do with smoke.
- The brisket will stop cooking–in the vernacular, it will stall–at around 160 degrees, and that’s when you wrap the meat to get it started again. Wrapping in foil makes the brisket mushy. It needs to be wrapped in pink butcher paper and put it back on the smoker, presumably because pink is a complimentary color, and I don’t think anyone makes blue butcher paper. Don’t take the brisket off again until it reaches an internal temperature of 200-210.
- The brisket needs to rest for an hour or so after you take it off.
- There is an optimal way to slice the brisket, involving slicing the flat and then turning it to slice the point. At Camp Brisket, Aaron Franklin demonstrated proper slicing, and from the attendees’ yearning you would have thought it was 1960 and Brigitte Bardot was strolling the beach at Saint-Tropez. For a long time there was a video on the internet of Franklin slicing brisket at our camp, but I can’t find it anymore. It was probably drowned in the tears of awe.
From left to right, that’s a black and red tarpon fly, a brown-ish tarpon fly, and a purple and orange tarpon fly, and all of them are now guaranteed to catch tarpon. The professors at A&M recommended a maroon and white fly, but then they would.
Kris said this looked unsanitary, but I think a good dose of saltwater will kill anything that might harm the tarpon.
The final Cuban fish is permit, the holy grail of saltwater fly fishing. For permit I needed something really special. Crab flies are the fly of choice, but I was concerned that the rubber legs on my permit flies would melt, and melted rubber legs might make the meat stringy. I decided I’d smoke the permit flies when I smoked salmon.
Unlike brisket and bacon, salmon is cold smoked. Over the years I’ve developed an extremely sophisticated cold smoking apparatus. It’s good for salmon. It’s also pretty good for Velveta to make smoked queso. Queso, by the way, is Spanish for cheese, but it’s also Tex-Mex for a slab of Velveta melted with a can of Rotel tomatoes, and is served along with salsa for dipping tortilla chips. It can get more complicated than Velveta and Rotel, and our friend Lisa Fain has a whole book on Queso variations, but it’s a basic food group for Tex-Mex, and non-fattening when eaten with chips.
It’s not the smoke, by the way, that preserves raw salmon. To preserve the salmon you have to cure it. My cure is salt, brown sugar, lemon zest, and most important, sodium nitrite, pink salt, to prevent botulism. I did not add sodium nitrite to the flies. After all, exposure can be harmful, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt the fish.
Salmon also needs to have been frozen to kill parasites, but unless you’re standing by a salmon river or your fishmonger has in-season fresh salmon shipped from Alaska, your wild salmon is likely to have been frozen. Otherwise it’d smell a bit ripe. If it’s farmed salmon, and you’re not sure if it’s been frozen, I reckon it could be frozen before or after smoking.
I brine my salmon in iced salt water for an hour or so, then dredge it in the cure. After 48 hours in the fridge under the weight of a couple of six-packs, I wash off the cure and give the salmon a series of water baths. About 45 minutes total is enough to tone down the salt, but I change out the water a couple of times. The salmon dries in the fridge for 24 hours, then gets smoked for four hours with apple wood.
Since there’s only the cure and no heat to protect the meat, I tend not to smoke salmon during a Houston summer.
I originally took my salmon and bacon recipes from Michael Ruhlman and Bryan Polcyn’s Charcuterie, but I really like how this guy does salmon. On the recommendation of my friend Tom, I may try black tea in the cure next time, and the permit might like that better. Smoked salmon is best eaten with the classic Texas combination of lox on a bagel, cream cheese, red onions, and capers, all rolled together in cornmeal and fried.
From top to bottom, that’s a crab fly, and then a crab fly, and then another crab fly. The yellow stuff is some Velveta for queso.
