Taking Up Smoking

There are many excuses for taking up smoking again, and this is mine… A while ago I wrote an article about Somerset’s excellent Brown and Forrest smoke-house, but then I got to thinking - why should they have all the fun?

Strange isn’t it, how different smoke can be? Like millions of non-fag-smokers, I find the wholly unwelcome waft of a cigarette repulsive - but give me a blast of fragrant apple-wood smoke seeping across the garden, and I begin to drool with anticipation. 

Smoking food is magical. There is no other way of putting it. The aromatic smoke does something to an item - whether it’s a plan old bulb of garlic or a cured piece of fish - that no other process known to mankind can achieve. 

Talking of mankind, I will repeat something I’m always banging on about and that is my increasing certainty that we are really just Stone Age apes walking about the planet filled with default settings which have been hard-wired deep within us through eons of repetition.

Because our ancestors cooked food over open fires in smokey caves for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, our deep-seated instincts are programmed to make our nostrils widen and our mouths water when we smell food that has been in smoke.

Now, I’m not for a minute suggesting we all turn our backs on first class local smoking-houses - firms like Brown and Forrest need our business and loyalty especially having being hit so badly by this year’s Somerset Floods. 

But an occasional waft with some sawdust can be good fun - and, more important than that, the results can knock supermarket produce like the kind of rather greasy smoked salmon we buy in plastic sleeves into a cocked, fire-filled, hat. 

Smoking eels at Brown and Forrest

I think smoked salmon is the easiest route to go down if you are a first-timer and want to get an instant lottery-winner type buzz of achievement - but in the coming weeks I intend experimenting with smoked streaky bacon, a project I hope to report on here. 

Both these things require curing, and in the case of a side of salmon that means an overnight stay in some kind of sealed plastic container in the fridge. The basic cure mix is simply salt and sugar - for a whole salmon flank, about half a kilo of each. 

But I’m a busy bloke, I have an already overfilled, not very, large fridge - so I just don’t need all the fuss of dealing with such a large piece of fish. Instead I bought half a whole salmon fillet from a supermarket for £7 and put it in a smaller Tupperware type box complete with the required salt and sugar. 

And here’s the rub (if you’ll forgive the pun) - I put whole cumin, coriander and dried dill tips into a spice-blender and also worked the resultant mix into the flanks of the fish.   

That was when I’d got home from my travels around six in the evening - and the process took all of three minutes. At midnight just before going to bed, I took the box out of the fridge to find most of the dry ingredients had turned, as I’d expected, into a kind of sweet, aromatic, liquid brine - and I turned the salmon over so the other side of it would be fully submerged.  

Mid-morning the next day, I took the salmon out of the mix and washed it thoroughly under a running cold tap, then left it to dry in a fly-proof area, and finally made a hole about three inches from one end, through which I tied a loop of gardener’s string. This is necessary because you need to hang your side of salmon in the smoker for perhaps eight or ten hours, and sometimes the flesh can split and it can fall off the hook simply because of the pull of its own weight. 

So much for the preparation, now we get to the glorious fume-filled end of the story. And at this point some people might be thinking that it’s all very well for a person who owns a smoker - how will normal folk, who don’t have such a strange device, do the aromatic business?

Well, because we are cold-smoking here, almost any large empty container will do. Years ago when I lived in a big manor house, I used to employ the help of an ancient woodworm-eaten wardrobe in the bottom of which I’d put wood-dust into the stainless steel hub-cap of an even older Rover 90 car.

Nowadays I use the amazing Mac BBQ Pro Q, which is a West Country invention I wrote about in these pages a couple of years ago. Basically, it is a large black barbecue, made of steel sleeves that you can place on top of one another to build a kind of cylindrical tower. The beauty of the set-up is that you can barbecue and hot-smoke with exactly the same piece of kit - then cold-smoke in it if you do not require the heat. Check out http://macsbbq.buzzinteractive.co.uk/.

On the same website you can also find various wood-dust products which are the real-deal for cold smoking enthusiasts because the wood involved has been harvested specifically for smoking purposes and there is little or no bark in it.  

It’s fairly pricey, so sometimes I make my own. BUT, and it is a big but, I do not use the wood chips created by my chainsaw because the device is well-oiled and you do NOT want any traces of chain-oil in your smoking mix. 

If you happen to have a bit of well seasoned oak, beech, pear or apple wood lying around, get out an old, un-oiled, bow-saw and build up your arm muscles by sawing a limb or two over some kind of container to catch the sawdust. 

This week, being busy, I made do by grabbing a bag of wood-dust specially produced for smoking from my friends at Hot Smoked - and don’t think its appearance there didn’t make me think just how popular this innocent pastime is becoming… Supermarkets do not flog stuff unless an awful lot of people are interested in buying it. 

So there I am, already for the big-smoke. I am fortunate in that I own another Mac’s BBQ product - known as the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator. It is basically a wire mesh square tray that captures the wood-dust in a little spiral “road”. Fill the tray with the wood mix and push a lit child’s-night-light in to the slot provided, and the single tiny flame will light the wood-dust at the beginning of the “road” - this will slowly burn along its spiral way, round-and-round to the middle. 

Smoking salmon at Brown & Forrest

All the mix will have gone up in smoke, depositing its fragrance generously on your food. It should take about eight hours, but be warned - something I’ve learned is that smoking times can vary hugely depending on the wind. I would not attempt smoking in this way on a very windy day - all the fanning of oxygen can cause a tray of wood-dust to burn away in just a couple of hours.  

Also avoid heat-waves - the Mac BBQ Pro Q is black and the temperature can build to unhealthy levels just with the sunlight hitting its sides.  

Now, just before we put the lid on and walk away to leave our salmon turning terracotta orange and delicious - it is worth asking if there might be one or two other products to hand that you could bung in, just for the smokey pleasure. And, believe me, there always are. I never get my smoker going without insertinh a large chunk of plain cheddar cheese and a pat of butter. 

Place these in tin-foil “dishes” you’ve made specially to size - and please do always throw in a few whole garlic bulbs, which smoke beautifully. The cold-smoked process won’t melt either dairy product - and in a few days time, when you are fed up with eating cold salmon, you can always add it to a warm pasta dish…

Chop up any smoked salmon you have left over and fold it in with the cooked pasta along with a knob of smoked butter, a dribble of cream and a fistful of garden herbs. This is a ten-minute lunch you will find hard to beat, no matter how long someone’s spent over a smokey stove.