The objective of this study was to determine the processing conditions for salt dried rockfish Sebastes schlegeli by sun drying and cold-air drying, as measured by alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity. We processed salt dried rockfish samples. The salinity of rockfish samples was within 1% following salting with 25% salt brine for 3 h. The moisture content of salt dried rockfish was found to reduce linearly from 70.12 to 39.5 g/100 g over the same time interval. The water activities of salt dried rockfish by sun and cold-air drying were 0.94 and 0.87, respectively, after three days of drying. Acid values (AV) were 10.71 and 5.96 mg KOH/g, respectively, after the three day drying period. The ADH activity in a water extract from salt dried rockfish following sun and cold-air drying for 24 h was 228.5% and 226.1% at 13.3 mg/mL, respectively, and was higher than that when drying lasted for 48 and 72 h. The ALDH activity was not affected but both ADH and ALDH activity tended to decrease as the drying time increased from 24 to 72 h. The conditions of processing for the best quality of salt dried rockfish were determined to be drying with a cold-air system for 24 h. These results indicated that water extracts from salt dried rockfish have valuable biological attributes owing to the metabolizing of alcohol and can provide useful information for the design of drying systems for salt dried rockfish.