Always hot smoke pork. Unless you know what you're doing. In which case you'd know that.
Look at this for ideas on how to make a cheap home smoker that will work for you.
In general, you need:
- a heat source (hot plate works well)
- container for wood chips/sawdust (skillet works and helps modulate and spread heat)
- housing (any kind of box thing: cardboard, wood, ceramic, an existing grill... it just needs to seal and maintain a bit of heat)
- a rack for the food to be smoked (or you could use rope and hang food as in smoke houses)
- thermometer (poke it into the top or the side to keep an eye on things)
Put it all together, put the sawdust into the skillet, turn it on, and adjust for desired temperature. I'd recommend 200-250 for pork.
You may also want to put a second hotplate in with boiling water, or splash a bit of water in the smoke pan on occasion to keep the inside moist when smoking for long periods.
Before smoking anything, brine it and let it sit uncovered in the fridge for a day. This allows the surface protein to dry, and this helps to develop the smoke flavor.
I am projecting here, perhaps, but I think the question you're asking is "why doesn't my salmon come out moist and succulent like what I get at the store?"
A couple reasons.
First: you want to properly cure the salmon for at least 24 hours beforehand. 36 is better. To cure, you will need two whole sides of salmon (or one cut in half), with the skin on. Rub your cure into the flesh--so 2:1 salt:sugar, plus whatever other spices you care to use. The addition of brandy sounds lovely; I like tequila or a nice peaty/smoky Scotch myself, or maple syrup (but obviously nix the sugar if you're doing that). Place the two pieces together, flesh to flesh, optionally including herbs between. Wrap very tightly in plastic, completely sealed, bung into your fridge to let it cure.
Second: when the fish is cured, remove from the wrap, rinse off the cure.
Third: time to smoke. If you want dry and flaky, hot smoke--this seems to be what you're doing and what you don't like. Therefore, it's cold smoke time. The two basic ways to do this are either to add LOTS of trays of ice to the smoker itself, or to route the smoke through a cooler filled with ice and then back into your smoking chamber. A quick Google should provide you with diagrams for doing so.
Do not over-smoke. Fish picks up flavours quite readily, and will dry out if oversmoked, even if cold. Really for salmon I don't think you need much more than 20 minutes of cold smoke.
Best Answer
I wouldn't recommend smoking any whole poultry without the skin as it may dry out the meat. You would have to be constantly basting it and that would throw off your cooking time and temperatures due to keeping the lid open to often.
Not knowing your cooking technique, I can only guess at a few things. Either you're not cooking it slow enough to allow the smoke to set in or you're not using enough smoke. I like to cook very low at about 185 to 250 for a few hours with plenty of visible smoke then I raise the temperature to about 350 to 375 to finish it off keeping the bird close to the heat source so that it crisps the skin slightly.
Some other advice would be to avoid checking the bird often. It's tempting to see what's going on under that lid but if you lift the lid to often you're letting all that good smoke out and losing the flavor.