Yukon River Chowder

Freshly smoked salmon and Midnight Sun vegetables become sustenance with a sense of place.

In 1990, I drove 4,000 miles in five days, from New Hampshire to Alaska, with my then-boyfriend, Mark. Seeking adventure, and in Mark’s case, amnesty from the GMC repo man, we packed off in his Jimmy for Salcha, a sled-dog breeder’s enclave just south of Fairbanks, smack dab in the middle of the largest state in the nation. His brother raised champion sled dogs there, with his wife, a Norwegian expat.

We stopped only to drink, shower, gas up, and swap seats.

After arriving, we spent a month setting up camp on the beautiful banks of the Yukon River. To get to the summer dog camp was a four-hour drive on the oil road, a seemingly endless rolling dirt highway. The bumpy rutted path follows the silver serpentine Trans-Alaska pipeline, the state’s financial aorta, flowing through arctic tundra to ultimately deliver oil to the lower 48. It stretches 789 miles from Prudhoe Bay to Juneau, Alaska, currently pumping 1.8 million barrels of oil a day.

From where the road meets the Yukon River was a 20-minute high speed boat ride to the camp. We arrived mid-May. The site hadn’t been used in a couple of years. Picture a rise on the north bank of a large brown river, two tent platforms tucked among trees, a cold storage (aka hole) dug into a hillside, a smokehouse frame. And all important: a two-seater outhouse, with a view of the stream.

Under their permit, we could seine or trap any salmon for canine or human use. Three types of salmon spawn in the Yukon and its tributaries, running one after the other, June through October: king, sockeye, then Chinook. The latter is the longest and most productive run for subsistence fishermen like our outfit; Chinook is also known as “dogfish” or “chum” salmon.

Our first task was to carve out space for 90 sled dogs in the trees along the river’s ridge. Not Iditarod sled dogs, for the record. Those are long distance athletes. These dogs were sprinters, bred especially to run short tracks at high speeds, of more than 20 miles per hour. The Iditarod teams, human and canine, train for a single ultra-marathon. These dogs were speedsters, vying against their rival teams weekend after weekend across the Yukon Territory and Alaska.

Fifty of the dogs were spring pups that ran free, all in need of names. The honor fell to me, the cheechako, or newcomer. I named one litter for rock and roll stars (Bonnie, Bruce, Mic), another for Shakespeare’s characters (Ferdinand, Othello, Hamlet), another for friends, the last, for family. As it happened, Ophelia was the runt of all the litters and was culled. Josie, named for my sister, ran to glory, a decorated lead female in her class; later, a champion breeder.

The next thing we did when we got to the river was plant a garden. Here in the land of the Midnight Sun, things seemed to grow around the clock. I would wake up to cabbages and lettuce twice the size as the day before. In June, the sky would become like dusk around midnight, for a couple of hours, and then day would return. We were sixty miles from the Arctic Circle.

The hardest work was setting up the fishing operation. We caught waterlogged trees drifting down the river, stripped them of their bark, then lashed them together to form a floating processing deck. We made giant weirs, curling riverbank saplings into bentwood fish wheels. We built underwater fences to guide fish beneath our traps on their upriver journey. We flopped into our cots at night, exhausted, too tired to swat the persistent squadrons of hummingbird-sized mosquitoes.

King salmon spawn first. During their short run, we caught several 80+ pound beauties. From these amazing fish, I learned to cut long uniform strips of flesh and skin. We brined the strips and dried them for a day, then moved them pole by sticky pole into the smokehouse. For two and a half days, we kept a pile of hardwood belching a deep black plume. When done, the strips had turned the aubergine of deep bruises. To eat salmon jerky is to have scarlet-colored oil slip down your chin while marveling at the taste of something approaching salmon bacon.

Later in the season, we prepared a different kind of smoked salmon, from the smaller but more plentiful and generally maligned chinook. Brined and dried, thicker slices were smoked for only half a day, then packed into mason jars and pressure-cooked. Once sealed, we’d re-crate the hot jars and stack them like so many gold bars; we produced 20 case. They fetched $120 each from neighbors and other breeders, or given as prized holiday gifts to family in the lower 48.

It was the latter type of smoked salmon that I used for chowder, similar to store-bought. On the river, I used powdered milk and it worked well. In a memorable version, I added shucked corn that I had saved in the cold storage.

SMOKED SALMON AND CORN CHOWDER

• 4  tablespoons butter
• 1 small onion, peeled and diced
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 large Idaho potato – peeled and cut into ¼ inch cubes
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 4 ears of corn, shucked
• 1 cup smoked salmon cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 1 small red chili pepper, deseeded and finely minced
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon white pepper
• ¼ cup fresh chopped flat leaf parsley
• ¼ cup of fresh chopped dill
• ¼ cup fresh chopped chives
• 1 cup heavy cream

In a large stockpot over medium-high heat melt butter.  Add onion and bay leaf. Cook 8 to 10 minutes or until the onions are transparent but not browned.  Stir in the potatoes and paprika.  Add chicken stock. Simmer for 15 minutes or until potatoes are tender.

Cut ears of corn in half, then stand on end on cutting board and run a knife down the ears to remove kernels. Add shucked corn kernels to pot.

Stir in salmon, salt, and pepper. Simmer over low heat, uncovered for 15 minutes.

Stir in the cream and continue to cook for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add fresh herbs to soup. Serves six.