Hooked on smoked salmon: tasting revelations with Dave Parham

“That was all thanks to, as he is now, King Charles. I was offered a stand at the Millennium Show at Clickimin in Lerwick and he’d been given a list of producers and asked whom he would like to see. On that list was The Hand-Made Fish Company, and because, at that time, I was working with organic farmed salmon, I think that’s probably why he’d heard of me. He was asking me, did I have brochures, did I have this, did I have that, and I had to say, ‘I’m sorry sir, I’ve got nothing!’

“So, he said, ‘Well, we’d better just try some now.’ There were two photographers in the tent and photos were going everywhere of me and Prince Charles tucking into smoked salmon.

“Later that year, there was a restaurant show at Olympia in London that Christopher Ritch and I went to, with Christopher’s organic salmon, which I was smoking. It just happened that one of the Queen’s caterers was at the restaurant show and came by and tried some. By that time, I had produced a little brochure, with a picture of me and Prince Charles. ‘You’ve been feeding him?’ And I said yes; and that’s how, through him, I got into feeding the royal family.

“I also had an open order from a London company, Deliverance, for 30 kilos of smoked salmon a week, and I could never get near that amount, but they said that they’d buy whatever I produced, and keep me going. It was they who ran the stall at Borough Market for me. Good guys.”

Word spread, and Dave’s smoked salmon was featured by Matthew Fort in The Guardian, leading to a lot more mail order work. It helped that it was easy to send smoked salmon to London, as so much other Shetland fish goes to Billingsgate. Sometimes, though, some creativity was needed in deliveries, as in the case of the Auchterarder House Hotel.

“The chef had a friend who ran a florist’s in Auchterarder. The Shetland truck driver would pull up at the side of the road outside Auchterarder, telephone her, and she would come out to pick up the fish and deliver it to the hotel!”

Dave is still smoking as enthusiastically – and painstakingly – as ever. So, it was a real pleasure to sit down with him and sample the result. For our lunch, he cooked some scrambled egg, made little flatbreads and opened a couple of packets of that wonderful smoked salmon.

And he conducted an experiment, which turned into a revelation.

Dave sliced a little of our salmon using a sharp steel knife, but for the rest, he employed a piece of flint. much as our distant ancestors must have done; and, as we’ll see, this isn’t the only connection that Dave has made with ancient techniques. Flint was commonly used for cutting before smelting allowed metal to be forged. The shaping (or ‘knapping’) of flint to create knives was a highly skilled occupation. On a visit to Denmark, Dave collected many pieces of knapped flint on a visit to Roskilde Fjord, incidentally the site of a 1960s archaeological investigation in which the remains of five Viking ships were recovered.

We discovered that there was a noticeable difference in the taste and texture of the fish, depending on the way it had been cut.

The flint produced a less clean cut than the knife; two or three passes were required. That created a different texture. But the more surprising outcome was that we both thought that the taste was more intense and smokier. We were, we agreed, breaking new ground here!

What was also clear from this tasting was that salmon sliced ‘across’ the grain, as Dave was doing here – offers an experience that’s much more satisfying than the ‘horizontal’ slices we find in those supermarket packets; and that applies whether you use a knife or a flint. Cutting across the grain means that the spectrum of flavour encompasses both the smokier, saltier outside of the fillet and the much milder inside. Dave compares the experience of a smoked salmon tasting to the intricacy of a Japanese tea ceremony: “it’s about taking time, but also enjoying the flavours and the after-flavours.”

There are also differences in taste and texture that depend on which part of the fish is being eaten. Dave prefers the lower, belly part of the fish; the top half, he feels, is ‘too buttery, I like something a bit firmer.” But, he says, many smokehouses don’t sell the lower part in sliced form, instead turning it into paté.

To my palate, either part seemed delicious – stunning, in fact.

Dave is, quite rightly, obsessed with quality and he’s generally very impressed by the fish that he’s able to buy in Shetland. Nevertheless, despite their overall excellence, there are subtle variations, mostly because the strength of tides varies between the sites at which the fish are reared. A salmon reared in an area with particularly strong tides, like Balta Sound in the northernmost island of Unst, will be ‘a completely different fish’ from one reared where tides flow more slowly. One of Dave’s tasks is to balance these natural variations so that the product is as consistent as possible.

The skill, experience and attention to detail that goes into this is profound. “You have to be able to look at the outside of the fish and have some idea of how it’s life has been”. Then, “when you’re filleting it, what you’re looking for is reassurance that what you saw from the outside was actually right. And you’ve got to know, from looking at the outside, if you’ve aged it enough. Once you’ve filleted it, you can’t age it any more.”

Not all kinds of food are suitable for smoking, Dave feels, indeed he thinks that most foods taste better in their natural, unadulterated state than they do when smoked. He reckons that for something to taste good when smoked, there has to be some fat content – though an exception, he says, is smoked haddock. Duck works much better than chicken, as he discovered when asked to design a smoker for chicken for one of the kitchens for ‘Deliverance’ in London. Years ago, he smoked squid, and it’s “the best bacon you’ve ever eaten in your life! Absolutely stunning!”

Mussels can work, but other kinds of shellfish don’t. In all of this, he adds, it’s important to remember that 80% of taste is actually smell.

The effect of smoking depends on the temperature at which the wood is burning in the smoker. The oak sawdust ignites at about 290°C and he tries to keep the burning temperature no higher than about 310°C. Using his own fine-grained sawdust made from an un-seasoned oak log that is slightly damp helps achieve that. The temperature of the smoke when it reaches the salmon needs to be as low as possible, and certainly no more than 30°C; “the colder the better”, and it helps to be near the sea. “In warmer places, you’re going to be running into problems, because the ambient temperature is so much higher.”

Another element in the process is ash. “I’ve realised how important ash is to what I do. I’m getting a depth of flavour now that I never used to.”

All of this extraordinary knowledge is what makes Dave’s product as good as it is. It’s very good news for smoked salmon lovers everywhere that he’s aiming to increase production and satisfy demand from beyond Shetland’s shores.

However, as I discovered towards the end of my visit, Dave has another skill, and – like the use of the flint blade – it’s linked to ancient practices, neolithic in Norway and Viking in Iceland. Dave explains:

“In southern Norway, a man was draining his field, excavating channels, and he started to find loads of fish bones, and it absolutely stank. He kept digging and found a bone fish hook. In a more recent archaeological survey, various artefacts were found including bone fish hooks. It turns out that the area used to be a lagoon, but Norway has risen fast after the ice age, and my theory is that bluefin tuna – the most common bone found there – were probably chasing herring. The Neolithics probably didn’t catch many tuna but killed plenty which sank to the bottom of the lagoon.”

Fast forward a few thousand years and…..

“Back in the day, the Vikings caught haddock, transported them to Iceland, and probably dried them, but without salting them. They probably landed them on the east side of Iceland and transported them over land, definitely to Akureyri and then Ísafjörður, over on the west side. When archaeological excavations have been undertaken they’ve found hoards of haddock ‘lug bones’ (cleithrum), but in every case the ‘tail’ of the bone had been snapped off; and when I’m filleting large haddock I remove the ‘lug bones’ , wash and dry them and do the same, because the ‘tails’ of the bones are too thin to be of any practical use.

“What’s also interesting, for me, is that most of these bones come from haddock living in around a hundred fathoms of water. So, were the Vikings fishing for haddock in six hundred feet of water? Today, it’s very unusual to find a haddock of the right type that has a bone this big. These are not common, and it’s only through me working with a lot of haddocks that I have these.

“Anyway, I found out about these stories and realised that with the shape of the bone, you could get a pretty good likeness of what is actually a neolithic fish hook. So, I’m making neolithic fish hooks from haddock bones! The bones themselves are incredibly hard and even with modern-day tools it takes me most of a day to carve a single fish hook. My thoughts are that the Vikings discovered these remarkable bones but due to their hardness they found them totally unworkable. Having said that, a chess piece similar to those of the ‘Lewis Chess Men’ has been discovered in Norway and it’s made from a haddock ‘lug bone’ ”

Reflecting on life in Shetland, Dave is clear about what appeals to him about the islands.

“The freedom! Total freedom. Physically, I can walk anywhere I like. To begin with, it felt a bit like trespassing, but, having had the shop for 19 years, I can’t go anywhere without knowing who owns the land. I probably couldn’t go anywhere in Shetland without meeting somebody that I knew. I think that’s what keeps me here. Although there is the Scottish freedom to roam, It feels to me like a privilege rather than a right. I live in wonderful isolation, but when I can go anywhere I like, that’s not isolated! And you never, ever feel lonely up on the hill. For me, horizons are a big thing; just to be able to go up the hill and look out, even when the weather is awful!”

“And I love Shetland folk. Coming from a fishing background, and having the history that I have, well, I wasn’t born here, but I might as well have been. They’re good folk.”

As the testimonial below confirms, Dave’s smoked salmon hits the spot. It seems that we can look forward to those wonderful flavours from Dave’s smokehouse for many years to come.