cheltenham | hospitality
Tom Parry (left) and Richard Cook
“I have little doubt that this is the most sustainably produced smoked salmon in this country”
sources it from several places, “All sustainably produced. The Faroes are producing some amazing salmon at the moment, which is a great alternative to Scottish produced. There’s very good organic fish coming from Northern Ireland. We don’t stick to one – they are all very different, both in price and flavour, so it depends on what we want to achieve.” Of course when Richard started the Smokery some 27 years ago, he was able to use the harvests from the two rivers it is named for, the Wye and the Severn. “It wasn’t only salmon from those rivers. The thing that made this area
special was the ‘silver’ harvest of eels. I’m still very passionate about eels and elvers, so I run a big project with local schools breeding and releasing glass eels into the river.” “What is so fantastic about Richard’s produce is that we can develop things together,” Tom says. Richard agrees: “It’s one of the reasons we don’t do retail. It means that I can tailor the produce to what the chefs want.” That means providing up to two tonnes of smoked salmon a season, which is a pretty serious responsibility. “We do a few different things for Tom – from different fish for
the different menus to different cures. At the moment we’ve been working on a tarragon and orange gravadlax, which is really good. We’ve also installed a Himalayan salt chamber, which allows us to cure and age the fish in a very different way before it is smoked.” But it isn’t just the salting that has an effect. Everything, from whether the fish is skinned before it is cured and smoked to how it is sliced, will affect the flavour, Richard says, as he and Tom head off to the development kitchen to try out some new recipes. “So it does mean that the possibilities are endless.”
Kalendar 69
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog