Quick Answer
Smoke salmon with cherry wood at 65-80°C (150-180°F) for 2-3 hours. Internal temp: 63°C (145°F). Cherry adds a sweet, fruity, with a beautiful mahogany colour flavour.
Why Cherry Wood for Salmon?
Cherry is a mild-medium-intensity smoking wood with a sweet, fruity, with a beautiful mahogany colour flavour profile. Popular fruit wood prized for the colour it imparts.
Cherry is an excellent match for salmon. Gives meat a gorgeous red-mahogany hue. One of the most versatile woods. Blends well with hickory or oak.
Flavour
Sweet, fruity, with a beautiful mahogany colour
Smoker Temp
65-80°C (150-180°F)
Internal Temp
63°C (145°F)
How to Smoke Salmon with Cherry
- Prep the salmon: Dry brine with 2:1 sugar-to-salt mix for 4-8 hours. Rinse, pat dry, air-dry 1-2 hours until a tacky pellicle forms.
- Set up your smoker: Preheat to 65-80°C (150-180°F). Add cherry wood chunks (not chips — chunks burn slower and produce cleaner smoke). Use 2-3 fist-sized chunks to start.
- Smoke: Place the salmon on the grate, fat side up (skin side down). Maintain a steady temperature throughout the cook.
- Monitor: Use a leave-in probe thermometer. Check the temperature regularly.
- Target temp: Cook until the internal temperature reaches 63°C (145°F).
- Rest: Rest for 10 minutes before slicing or serving.
The pellicle is essential — it's the tacky surface that forms after air-drying. Smoke won't adhere without it. Hot smoked salmon is fully cooked and flaky, unlike cold smoked (lox). Keep the temp low to avoid the white albumin leaching out.
Wood Pairing Tips
Cherry sits in the middle of the intensity spectrum — strong enough to impart flavour but not so aggressive it overwhelms. A great standalone choice for salmon.
Pro tip: Always use seasoned (dried) wood, never green. Green wood produces bitter, acrid smoke. Chunks over chips for a cleaner, longer burn. And remember — thin, blue smoke is the goal. Thick white smoke means your fire needs more oxygen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is cherry good for smoking salmon?
Yes, cherry is an excellent choice for salmon. Cherry provides a sweet, fruity, with a beautiful mahogany colour flavour at mild-medium intensity.
How long to smoke salmon with cherry wood?
Smoke salmon with cherry at 65-80°C (150-180°F) for 2-3 hours. The wood choice doesn't change the cooking time — focus on the internal temperature reaching 63°C (145°F).
What temperature to smoke salmon with cherry?
Smoke salmon at 65-80°C (150-180°F) regardless of wood type. Cherry burns steadily — use 2-3 fist-sized chunks to start.
How we work this out
Every time on this site comes from one place: a cook profile for each cut, holding a pit temperature, a rate, a rest time and a doneness target. You pick your cut, your smoker setting and your weight, and we do the arithmetic — rate times weight for the big cuts, a fixed window for ribs and snags, thickness for steaks. That's it. There's no secret formula, and there's nothing clever going on behind the curtain.
The honest bit is what the arithmetic can't do. Your fire isn't our fire. A brisket that stalls at two in the afternoon doesn't care what a calculator said at breakfast. Wind, lid-lifting, a fatter flat, a colder bird straight from the fridge — all of it moves the number, and none of it is something we can see from here.
So treat what we give you as a guidance window, not a guarantee. It's the answer to "roughly when should I light this thing", not "your brisket will be ready at 4:47". Cook to feel and to temperature, never to the clock — the probe slides like butter, the ribs crack when you bend them, the bone pulls clean. That's what tells you it's done. We're just here to help you work out when to get up.
What we assume
- You're cooking one cut at a time, unless you've added more to the plan.
- Your smoker holds the temperature you picked, give or take the usual.
- Your meat starts near fridge temperature, not sitting out on the bench.
- Weights are raw, before trimming.
- Rest time sits on top of the cook time, not inside it.
Change any of those and the number moves. Change a few and it moves a lot.
Where these numbers come from
Every safe internal temperature on this site comes from an Australian food-safety authority, and we link to the exact page. Not a summary of it, not our reading of it — the page, so you can check us.
Last checked: 19 September 2026.
Food safety — Australian authorities
Cooking times are a different thing, and we'd rather be clear about the difference. Where we could find a named reference, we've used it and linked it. Where we couldn't, we say so on that cut instead of filling the gap with a guess.
Of the 20 cuts behind the calculator, all 20 carry a safe internal temperature from an Australian food-safety authority, 15 carry a cooking window from a named reference and 11 carry a cooking rate. The remaining 5 say so on the cut rather than borrowing a number from somewhere else.
Whole Chicken, Chicken Wings, Chicken Thighs and Turkey Breast — 4 of the 20 — carry a sourced safe temperature but no cooking-time reference we could find at all. Their times are still our original figures, and we would rather tell you that than let a list of citations imply otherwise.
Cooking times — named references
Australian figures, not American ones
This matters more than it sounds. Australia and the United States disagree on several meats. A sausage is 75 °C here and 71 °C there. A pork chop is 70 °C here and 63 °C there — and more than that, Australia treats a whole cut of pork the way it treats a steak, while the United States mandates a minimum the way it does for chicken. We publish the Australian figure, we say it's the Australian figure, and we record the American one alongside rather than splitting the difference. Nobody is served by an average of two countries' food-safety advice.
Still use a thermometer
None of us can tell whether something is cooked by looking at it. Cook to the temperature, not to the clock — and if our time and your thermometer disagree, your thermometer is right.
The times on this page came from the site's original cooking data. They have not all been reconciled against the sourced cook profiles above yet, and where the two disagree the sourced profile is the one with a citation behind it. That work is under way.
