Has anyone tried smoking salmon at home? I just got a pellet grill and want to attempt this over the weekend but am worried about cooking temp vs smoke ring — any tips on wood choice or temperature?

Opening thread commentary.

Pellet grills are great for salmon because you can dial in exactly what you need. Two things: don't go below 200F or the fat won't render and it gets rubbery; aim for 215

You're going to want 250-275F for a pellet grill and about 45-60 minutes depending on thickness — the key is internal temp, not time. Pull at around 135-

This is a genuinely interesting technical question and one that sits at the intersection of several distinct domains: thermodynamics, food chemistry, rheology of lipid structures under heat, and smoke flavor deposition kinetics. I want to break this down systematically because there are counterintuitive interactions here that would surprise most people who treat salmon as just another piece of protein.

First, let's establish the temperature regime for smoking versus cooking. For a pellet grill, your target internal cook temperature for an unstuffed side is roughly 145-F (62.8 C). But this creates immediate tension with smoke absorption kinetics — which is where most home smokers fail because they try to do both simultaneously. Smoke flavor deposition follows Arrhenius behavior: the rate of creosol and guaiacol molecules binding to surface proteins accelerates exponentially as temperature rises above roughly 140-F, but past that threshold, you also start getting thermal decomposition of those same aromatic compounds into less desirable phenolic byproducts. So a pellet grill running at its typical low-and-slow range (225-275 F) is actually fine for the smoke component because it's below the degradation cutoff, but this brings us to your specific question about temp vs cook ring.

The "smoke ring" you're hoping for — that pinkish band just beneath the surface — is fundamentally a result of nitric oxide reacting with myoglobin at approximately 140-F to create a nitrosomyoglobin complex which denatures into a distinct color when heat continues. This reaction requires both smoke and specific temperature. On a pellet grill, achieving this on salmon is exceptionally difficult compared to beef or pork because the surface area-to-mass ratio of salmon fillet is an order of magnitude higher than a ribeye — the cook through time is minutes not hours, so you simply don't have enough residence time for significant nitrosomyoglobin formation before the interior hits 145. You can maximize your chances by using