Bertha’s been feeling a little left out since the Berthamobile came on the scene, so to make up for the lack of action we thought we’d experiment with some hot smoking.
We had an event down in Dorset over the weekend and to link in with the local seafood festival we hot smoked some salmon for the occasion, here’s how we did it.
12 hour cure consisting of:
 – 80:20 mix of rock salt and molasses sugar
– We also added some ground pink pepper corns, allspice and cloves but these spices didn’t come through in the flavour so we’d skip this next time
Rolling the salmon in the mix we left it overnight to cure. In the morning we rinsed off the salt and set it aside for the smoker.
After firing up Bertha on kindling we chopped some fine sticks of beech and added these to the fire, once the flames took we added the salmon and boxed up the oven.
15 minutes later the salmon was cooked and it turned out some of the best hot smoked fish we’ve tried; pair that with some ricotta and watercress and you’ve got one of our current favourite pizza toppings  – the old girl’s still got it.