Suddenly, smoking is fashionable - the hot-smoking of foods that is. Every restaurant is catching and latching onto it, and it's easy to understand why. Home-smoked foods, prepared with a minimum of equipment, are the hot thing among cutting-edge chefs. And given that it is so easy, there is no reason why you shouldn't be hot-smoking in the privacy of your own kitchen.
The attraction is simple: smoke - an astonishingly complex substance - has a couple of hundred different components that give multiple flavours to the food. Traditionally, smoking has been used as a method of preserving foods, but there is no reason why it can't be used simply to add another edge of flavour to what we eat.
Most of the smoked foods you will have come across will probably have been cold smoked - salmon, for example, is usually smoked this way. But with hot smoking, you smoke it and then eat it straight away. And, as you can rig up a smoking pan on your own stove, there is no reason why you can't tap into those musky, alluring aromas.
One of the foremost practitioners of food smoking is Seamus O'Connell of the Ivory Tower in Cork, who has just opened a seasonal restaurant in Goleen, west Cork, called The Sea Urchin (028-35622). "I wanted to have the kind of fish restaurant that you dream about finding close to the coast in Ireland, but which scarcely exists," says O'Connell, and he has created a lovely room to match the thrilling excitement of his cooking. One of his fish dishes is wild salmon, hot smoked to order, with a lemon geranium sauce (recipe below). The technique O'Connell uses can be done in any house on any stove, and it goes like this:
Take one wok and one Chinese bamboo steamer. If you don't have either of these you can rig up something with a large covered pan and a rack which will sit above the smoking material. Then choose the medium over which you wish to smoke - here we give a recipe for chicken smoked over the traditional Chinese mixture of tea, rice and brown sugar, and one for fish smoked over sawdust and wood shavings.
Source your wood carefully. The best source is a woodworker who uses home-dried wood, or untreated wood. Kitchen shops and fishing shops also sell wood specifically designed for home-smoking.
Line the wok (or frying pan) with tin foil and put over a high heat, with the smoking ingredients arrayed around the base of the wok. Then suddenly you're smoking. Place in your pre-seared meat or fish (searing gives the food an attractive appearance), turn down the heat, and wait for that heady aroma to fill the kitchen.
Hot Tea-Smoked Chicken
A friend to whom we served some of this smoked chicken described it as "the nicest thing I have ever eaten in my life!". It bears no relationship to that "smoked" chicken which appears so often in salads and which is papery and dry. If you can get a good free range chicken with a respectable amount of fat, then this smoking technique gives you brilliantly moist, flavourful, to-die-for smoked chicken.
2 large breasts of free-range chicken
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon brown sugar
Smoking Mixture:
3 tablespoons tea
3 tablespoons white rice
3 tablespoons brown sugar
sesame oil
tin foil
Mix together the mirin, soy sauce and brown sugar. Make slashes in the chicken skin, and soak the chicken in the mixture. Line the wok with tin foil, and spoon in the tea, rice and sugar, mixing together well. Spread this smoking mixture all over the wok, leaving a slight hollow in the mix (a mound of ingredients won't smoke evenly).
Put another pan on a high heat. When it gets very hot, drizzle some sesame oil in the pan and then sear the slashed skin side of the chicken breasts for one or two minutes until the slashes are well defined. Season the chicken liberally with salt. Place the chicken, skin side up, in a bamboo steamer. Cover and place in the wok over a high heat. Smoke on high heat for four minutes, then lower the heat and smoke a further 20 minutes.
Seamus suggests you serve the chicken, sliced, with a salad dressed in a vinaigrette flavoured with miso, wasabi, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ground nut oil and a little tahini.
Hot Whiskey-Smoked Salmon with Lemon-Geranium Sauce Once again, this is a moist confection, the fish fragrant with the wood smoke and the suggestion of whiskey.
Smoking Mixture:
2 generous handfuls chemical-free wood in the form of half curls,
half sawdust
1 shot whiskey tin foil
salmon fillets
salt and sugar
Sauce:
750mls fish stock
300mls white wine
300mls cream
3 lemon geranium leaves, roughly chopped
Mix together the fish stock and wine in a pan, and reduce by half over a high heat. Add the cream and geranium leaves and reduce again until syrupy. Remove the leaves.
Line the wok with tin foil and put in the wood. Sprinkle the whiskey over it.
Season the fish liberally with salt and sugar. Place the wok on a medium heat for about 10 minutes, until smoking. Sear the salmon fillet in a little olive oil over very high heat, for less than a minute, then place the fish in the basket of your steamer, sit the steamer on the wok and smoke over a high heat for a minute. Turn down the heat and smoke for a further three to six minutes, depending on the thickness of your fillet. Serve with the warm sauce.
Clove and Honey-Mustard Smoked Turbot
The mustard and honey glaze gives a brilliant edge to the lush flavour of the turbot, with an Asian element added by the cloves.
equal quantities of mustard and honey cloves
fillets of turbot
salt
wood smoking mixture, as above for salmon
Season the fish with salt. Stud with cloves and paint with the honey/mustard mixture. Follow the instructions for smoking the salmon, as above. Seamus serves this with a pineapple salsa.
Seamus O'Connell's other ideas for smoking include:
Hot-smoked mussels (place a bowl in the smoking chips to catch some of the moisture) serve with a basil, balsamic and olive oil vinaigrette with a dice of pumpkin.
Hot-smoked whelks with a horseradish mayonnaise.
Hot-smoked duck liver - use to make a pate.
Finally, we smoked a rolled and tied loin of lamb, initially seared in a very hot pan, using rosemary stalks and orange peel in the smoking mixture, then made an orange and rosemary sauce to partner it. So remember: if you can eat it, you can smoke it. And of course, if anyone asks you, you simply say that you never inhaled.