The Japanese kanji 'wa' .... apart from actually meaning 'Japanese' also has lots of meanings including ; peace and harmony. The first symbol means rice and the second means mouth . The interpretation that I would choose would be something like 'food harmony'.
I will always be of independent thought and not be swayed by external influences. I was genuinely shocked when I first discovered how flint slicing my smoked salmon allows me to taste far more of the natural flavour of my smoked salmon.
It would have taken more than a year of repeated tastings and experimentation before I was happy that metal ion transfer was the root of the problem. I am so fortunate that I've had so many 'boffins' coming to tasting sessions , a good few scientists including 4 food scientists and 2 'organometallic chemists' ( hope I spelled that right ) !
Then the realisation dawned on me that I was not going to produce any smoked salmon that had been in contact with metal after it had been salted. The upshot of that was that I would need to completely reinvent how I produced my smoked salmon. Designing and building a smoker was remarkably straightforward. But to then produce the smoke as I wanted it was a real struggle. Around a year of trial and failure and, as usual with me , refining the process down to it's simplest natural form and it works and it's repeatable. I understand the basic physics of why it works but it will only work if I do everything in a very specific manner. Making fresh green oak sawdust by hand so that it stays cool and I don't lose too much flavour through evaporation of specific compounds . Also the sawdust needs to have a rough surface so that it will compact together and hold it's form kind of like an incense burner.
Now we start to get a bit Japanese ... In my final days of working with the previous salmon smoker I found that the flavour benefitted from laying a salmon fillet almost on the bottom of the smoker and allowing some of the heaviest smoke which had a large ash component to fall or condense onto the surface. This ash component has a slightly bitter tar flavour which complements the overall sweetness of the green oak smoke and I enjoyed the contrast in the flavours. However this wasn't technically possible in the new smoker and I remembered that I had some Japanese white oak charcoal - Binchotan- that I'd tried experimenting with previously so I duly ground some up into a very fine powder and mixed this with a portion of the green oak sawdust to form a layer in the combustion crucible ..... It worked ! It's an extremely long drawn-out process but the flavours I'm getting are the best ever. It's definitely a law of diminishing returns thing -if I flint sliced the smoked salmon that I made on the old smoker that was pretty good indeed but what I'm producing on the new smoker is definitely superior in flavour. Albeit that I'm now only smoking two fish per week as opposed to two fish per day !
Time and again I've found myself struggling, more with the discipline of my craft, it being so precise and delicate and more what one associates with a lot of the very fine Japanese artisans and not an old man living on a rock in the North Atlantic ....
