Organic this, organic that, but what's about organic smoked salmon? Some of the smoked salmon you come across may be palatable enough, but you doubt if it ever came within yards of smoke or flame. That bright magazine Organic Matters carries a success story. Cait Curran tells us that during the summer months of her youth, wild salmon was commonplace on the table. "At that time, it was readily available, if not always legally caught, and there was no indication that it would become the luxury item it is today. "Now that wild stock are depleted, she remarks, farmed produce is the order of the day and "to my mind much of what is available compares very poorly with the wild version". But recently she tasted some smoked Irish organically farmed salmon and both in flavour and texture it was "pure heaven".
But how do you farm salmon organically? Anyway, Clare Island Seafarm carries an IOFGA (Irish Organic Farmers' and Growers' Association) and Naturland symbol. The salmon are grown in cages well out to sea off Clare Island "in the wilds of the Atlantic in as natural a setting as is possible". Declan Droney of Kinvara Smoked Salmon not only sells the product in his shop in Kinvara, but also by mail order. He stocks the only organic gravadlax in Ireland or the UK, we are told, as well as smoked trout and eel and kiln roasted salmon! And his smoked salmon is smoked the traditional way, which is that the fillets are cured under a layer of natural sea salt. Then the salt is washed off and the fillets are placed in a kiln for five hours before the smoking begins. It is a mixture of oak and beech wood shavings that are used to produce the smoke which circulates around the fish - and this was a surprise - for a further seven hours. Declan Droney now supplies his organic smoked salmon to about 50 organic shops in the London area, we are told, and other well-known shops. Most of his business is mail-order, she writes and, imagine, nearly 40 per cent of his turnover comes in the three weeks before Christmas.
You may ask how farmed salmon can be organic. No antibiotics or fancy drugs or colourants, presumably? But the IOFGA imprint should be guarantee of that. . . Smoked salmon that is clearly, to the taste-buds, actually smoked is something. And don't say: "far from it we were reared". The author, Cait Curran, may not have had it smoked, but in youth, salmon was no luxury to her.