How long to smoke salmon, trout and catfish, hot or cured, and why the skin and the cure matter more than the weight.
Smoked shrimp recipes run from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half at similar chamber temperatures. The gap is not about size. Some cooks choose the slow number on purpose, to buy more time in the smoke before the shrimp is already done.
Updated Oct 2026
Smoked catfish times run from 45 minutes to 6 hours. The gap is not about the size of the fish. It comes down to whether the fillet was cured in salt and sugar before it ever reached the smoker.
Updated Oct 2026
Trout is timed as though it were a small salmon. It is not shaped like one. A whole trout is wrapped in skin, and skin is the one surface on the fish that smoke cannot get through.
Updated Sep 2026
Google's answer ranges from 30 minutes to 4 hours for the same fish, and the AI Overview stops to ask which one you mean before it commits to a number. Hot-smoked and cold-smoked salmon are not the same food, and only one of them belongs in this article.
Updated Oct 2026