Notes from the kiln

People ask, more often than they used to, what the kiln is doing while the salmon is in it. The answer is mostly: nothing dramatic. Oak shavings smoulder at a temperature low enough that you could put your hand into the smoke and not flinch. The fish hangs above. Time passes. That is the work.

What follows is a working journal, a few notes from the past month at the smokehouse, written between batches. Some of it is method. Some of it is weather. The smokehouse runs on weather almost as much as it runs on oak.

The cure

The cure is the simplest part of the three days, and the part most often misunderstood. Salt and Demerara sugar in approximately equal weights, applied generously, rubbed in by hand. The salt draws moisture; the sugar is for balance and a small amount of sweetness on the finish. Nothing else.

We do not add dill, juniper, citrus zest, or any of the other things that get added to “gravadlax-style” cures elsewhere. Those are different products. They are valid; they are not what we make. What we make is a cured-and-smoked side that tastes of salmon, salt, and oak. The job of the cure is to season the fish and pull moisture; the job of the smoke is to flavour it. Anything more in the cure dilutes the smoke’s role.

The salt matters

We use a coarse Atlantic sea salt from Wexford. It is more expensive than rock salt and noticeably less expensive than artisan flaked salts. The grain is large enough to draw slowly without tearing the surface; the mineral content is rounded enough that the finish is clean. We have tried four other salts over the years and stayed with this one.

The smoke

The smoke comes from oak shavings, never wood chips. Shavings smoulder; chips burn. Smouldering produces aromatic phenols and a smoke that hangs in the kiln long enough to do its work. Burning produces heat we do not want, heat that would cook the fish.

The shavings come from a furniture maker in Banbridge who lets us collect a sack a fortnight from his floor. They are the by-product of his work; he saves them; we drive over and collect. The exchange has been running since 2009.

The smoke does the seasoning the cure begins, in a slower hand, over fourteen hours.

Patrick McKenna, Master Smoker

Cold-smoking holds the kiln below 28°C, far below the 65 to 70°C at which fish protein begins to denature. The fish is being seasoned and dried, not cooked. This is the entire reason cold-smoked salmon has the silken texture it does. Hot-smoked salmon is a different thing, flaky, fully cooked. We do not make it.

The weather, briefly

The kiln vents to the harbour wind. On a still day the smoke loiters; on a Force 5 westerly it pulls through the rack like a draught up a chimney. Both extremes change the run by a small amount. We adjust the shavings, slightly more on still days, slightly less on windy ones, and let the rest happen.

This past month: 14 days of westerlies, four still days, two days the kiln did not run because the rain was sideways and the door would not stay closed. We do not run on those days. The fish keeps; the day is for slicing the previous batch.

The slicing

We slice on day three or day four, by hand, on a long Sheffield blade we have used for ten years. The blade is sharpened twice a week. We slice from the tail toward the head, against the grain, holding the blade nearly parallel to the board. Each slice is between 1.5 and 2 millimetres thick.

A whole side sits at approximately:

• 900g to 1100g per finished side (after cure and smoke moisture loss)
• 120 to 140 slices per side, depending on size and slicing pace
• 14 days of best-eating window after wrapping
• 30 days frozen, in the freezer paper we ship in

The slicing is the part that takes the longest to learn. Patrick has been doing it for forty years; his son Conor for nineteen. Both of them are noticeably faster than anyone we have hired in. We have not yet succeeded in teaching it from a written description.

What the knife is for

This is where the wooden gift box gets its slicing knife from. Not the long Sheffield bench blade, that one stays at the smokehouse, but a smaller, similar geometry blade that lets the home cook slice from the side at a comfortable angle. Most home blades are too short and too thick. The one we ship is long enough and thin enough.

Cure          : 12 hours · 4°C · sea salt + Demerara
Smoke         : 14 hours · <28°C · oak shavings, never chips
Rest          : 12 to 24 hours · 4°C · cool room
Slice         : day 3 or 4 · 1.5 to 2mm · long Sheffield blade
Pack          : greaseproof, vacuum, chilled jacket
Post          : Tue/Wed/Thu · overnight tracked
Best-eating   : 14 days from receipt
Freezable     : 30 days in shipping paper

Patrick McKenna · 04 March 2026 · Ardglass

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