Last week, in Part Two of Christmas Needn’t Cost the Earth,  we decorated the house with gathered grasses and seed heads, and during the cold snap in part one, we made ice art for the front door. This week, we share some Bridge Cottage recipes with you for making your own Christmas morning brunch of home smoked salmon, homemade cream cheese and freshly baked bannocks.

We have a family name for a full English, and that’s a Daddy breakfast – the works, sausage, bacon, eggs, beans, but this is known as a Tommy brunch after our eldest son, who loves the tradition of smoked salmon as a treat on Christmas morning. In the past we’ve wrestled with bagels, proving them overnight and popping in a pan of boiling sugar water to glaze and then baking – quite a phaff! This year, we’re going with bannocks. Easy, cheap and quick to make. Of course, had to do a dummy run to get the photos for you and test that all was delicious.

The recipe for bannocks, from the Gaelic bannach comes courtesy of Felicity Cloake who writes for the Guardian.

Felicity Cloake – The Perfect Bannocks.

The bannock recipe calls for buttermilk, but we’ve used the runoff we get from our tub of homemade yoghurt. It’s known as acid whey, and if you make your own yoghurt, you can collect this clear yellowy liquid in a jam jar in the fridge. We make a 3-pint tub of yoghurt every week and use any leftover to make soft cheese.

I’ve shared this in what has become a very popular post: Homemade Yoghurt and Soft Cheese.

Soft cheese is so easy – it’s just a case of hanging yoghurt in a piece of muslin overnight and collecting the drips in a bowl. We like it plain with our smoked salmon, but can have added chives

That’s the bannocks and soft cheese took care of, now to smoke our salmon!

As I said, Vegans look away.

Farmed salmon is getting a lot of bad press now, and quite rightly so in some cases. You might like to look at a more sustainable fish such as mackerel, but we’ve checked carefully and are assured that our salmon comes from a sustainable source. We have a wonderful old-fashioned butcher/fishmonger/veg shop in Haltwhistle, Belly Bell’s. It’s proper old school. Our granddaughter, Daisy loves a trip on the train (it’s only ten mins up the line) to go to Billy Bell’s for a pie. ‘Good old, Billy Bell’ we all chant.

With the salmon collected from Billy Bell’s – you might like to get a smaller fillet, half a salmon perhaps rather than a whole fish, we set about preparing it. This is the point at which I leave the kitchen. I’m not happy around fish heads. The only time in my life I’ve ever fainted was in a Spanish fish market when all the gaping fish mouths, and glassy eyes became too much for the pregnant me.

Tim chops the head off and fillets the salmon, putting the head and bones in a pressure cooker to make fish stock which is frozen in bags when cool and saved for a fishy risotto. If you don’t know how to fillet a fish, head over to YouTube and Gordon Ramsey will show you how.

How to fillet salmon by Gordon Ramsey.

Next, we decided on what proportion of the fish will be smoked and what will be chopped into fillets to freeze just as they are for the year ahead. It works out so much cheaper than buying individual fillets. And comes with less packaging.

In the summer months, we hot-smoke salmon on the barbeque and this is another option and another post altogether to be written. The method I’m writing about today is for cold smoked salmon.

You can weigh the piece of salmon you’re about to smoke at this stage. This is so you can work out the moisture content before and after curing and how dry your smoked fish is. I’m not a numbers person so don’t really bother with this. I just go by the feel.

Using the dry salt method to cure, lay your salmon fillet on a thin layer of cooking salt in a non-metallic container, preferably with a lid. Then rub a good handful of salt and soft brown sugar over the top. You can add juniper or fennel seeds if you have any to hand, although as the moisture is drawn out, I’m not convinced as to how much flavour this imparts. We used fennel seeds this year as we had some growing in the garden. You can also add a small amount of white pepper – just a pinch.

Cover and leave your salmon fillet to cure in the fridge for 3-4 hours. Then rinse off the salt and immediately pat dry on a clean tea towel or kitchen paper. Place on a cooling rack so the air reaches the top and underside and leave on a cool place to dry. The outside should look sealed when it is done.

It is at this stage that you can measure your moisture content and repeat the curing process if it isn’t dry enough.

You now need two things: a smoke generator and a container with a hole in the top. When we started, we used a strong cardboard box, a wine box, with a punctured hole in the top. Then Tim got clever and used some discarded plywood to build a smoking box. It really is just a box with a door and a hole in the top. He’s put runners in so we can fit three wire cooling racks in. While the salmon is smoking, we add a block of cheap cheddar to make smoked cheese, or chillies or garlic.

The smoke generator isn’t cheap, but it could make a good gift – I bought it for Tim as a Christmas present some years ago from ProQ Smokers. It’s a metal coil container that is filled with sawdust and has a place for a tealight. The coil is placed at the base of the box, with the sawdust burning slowly, with the smoke escaping through a small hole at the top. Tim reckons it takes two rounds of the coil or a few hours, to smoke a large fillet. You then need to leave the fish to mellow overnight. If it’s cool, and another reason why this is a great midwinter make, just leave it in the box outside.

All that’s left now is to slice thinly, and once we’ve rushed downstairs to see if ‘he’s been’, and opened our stockings (we’re still very big kids at heart here), then Christmas breakfast brunch can be laid up.

I’ll leave Tom, of the Tommy brunch fame and his fiancée, Rachel to toast you.

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

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