Woodcock Smokery is based in Southwest Cork, in Ireland, close to the pretty seaside village of Castletownshend. We work exclusively with wild fish, and cure our products in a traditional manner. This takes prime quality fish, native hardwood timbers, and time. All aspects of the process, i.e., filleting, salting, pinboning, and slicing, are done by hand by any one of our 4 employees.

Our wild salmon are caught in nets at sea by a small fleet of inshore fishermen, working in small boats within 9 kilometres of the coast. This fishery operates from the first day of June until the last day of July, and is permitted for 4 days per week. This gives a fishing season of just 32 days per annum, during which we must try to purchase enough stock to enable us to process and sell our wild smoked salmon throughout the year. Stocks bought by us are blast-frozen, then glazed with water and blast-frozen again, to keep the unprocessed fish in the best condition for future processing.

The wild salmon is an athletic creature, having spent its whole life fighting currents in the sea, and the musculature is tight. Irish wild salmon feed in the North-east Atlantic ocean, in locations that are thankfully still not known exactly, and they feed there for up to a year. After this time, when they grow at a miraculous rate, they need to return to the river of their birth, in order to reproduce themselves, and their long journey 'home' begins. Large numbers of fish travel back together to the coasts, and the creatures swim around the island until they 'smell' their own river. It is assumed that their sense of the chemical balance of the water, in which they hatched from the eggs left by the parent, is imprinted in their memory, and they are able to retrace the route taken over millennia by their predecessors. Miraculous indeed!

At the smokery, the fish are assessed for freshness and lack of damage, and then hand-filleted. Next, they are carefully washed and laid out in beds of dry salt. The period of salting is calculated, based on our 20 years of experience, as these are wild creatures and are unique individuals. So each fish is given different salting times according to size and fat-content.

Dry-salting is slow, in keeping with the Slowfood philosophy, and gives good texture and good curing. After rinsing off the salt, the 'sides' are put into our kilns, and the long smoking period begins. Ireland is well known for its rainfall, and humidity is one of the natural controls on the smoking time. So, if conditions are perfect, with cool air temperatures and low humidity, the process might last only 12 hours. After the initial smoking period, the sides are 'pinboned' again by hand, to remove bones.

Sides are put back into the kilns, and smoked until we have a dry pellicle, which is totally inhospitable to bacteria. Vacuum-packing further ensures a good shelflife. After vacuum-packing, the sides are held in the coldroom @ 4*C until required. If a batch of fish is cured out to the optimum, this batch will be labeled for 'maturing', and will be held for a period of 3 months before being offered for sale. The flavours in this fish become more homogenized through the flesh, rather than the 'stratified' flavours (salt,smoke,fish) which the regular sides have.

The entire process is HACCP approved and all the stages of the curing process are logged batch by batch to ensure full traceability. All commercially caught salmon is now on a quota as well as a severely restricted fishing season. It is hoped that this will help to onserve stocks in the long term. Each and every fish has its own individual tag number, which we are obliged to record when we process them. This tells us who the fisherman that caught that fish was, and when he caught it.