Lynne Wilson and David Mitchell with a salmon at Kingcombe Picture: GRAHAM HUNT/HG3372

THERE is something cloak-and-dagger going on at Kingcombe Smokery. In this bucolic hideaway in Kingcombe, the details of the smoking procedure are kept under wraps.

The recipe is a secret imported from Norway and Lynne Wilson who owns the smokery would like it to stay that way.

There is a reason for the furtiveness. Lynne explained: "Once you have tried our salmon, you do not want anything else again."

It is true. After my visit, I drive back to the newsroom with my sample, filled with good intentions to share it with my colleagues. But the sad reality is that once I have opened the packet of homesmoked salmon, I would not want to share it with my starving babies. I consume the fish in one greedy inhalation, which is only slightly marred by guilt.

"Our customers have been coming to us for eight years," said Lynne. "We have got several clients who will order half a dozen sides at a time. They are coming back in droves. At Christmas, for three months we are flat out."

The seeds for Kingcombe Smokery were sown in 1990 when Lynne's husband, Minto, a fishing aficionado, became very ill.

"When he got better, everyone asked him fishing and we had so much fish in the deep freeze, we had said we would smoke them," said Lynne. "So he went off to Norway where he had an interest in a river and I built the smokery down here and it took a year to get the recipe just right."

Lynne said: "He died in 2006 and into my life came David and Suzie."

Lynne met David Mitchell, a trained caterer who now manages the smokery, through his wife Suzie, who came to help Lynne with the housework after her husband's death.

"Luckily, one person had my husband's recipe for smoking the salmon and we tweaked it a bit after last Christmas," Lynne said. "We have started doing smoked salmon pate, and smoked potted shrimps from Morecambe Bay."

Smoked garlic - huge on the continent - is also one of specialities of the smokery.

At the moment, Lynne is hoping to move which might mean a larger repertoire.

"If we move to the house I want to move to, we have got quite a big set-up of buildings we can use," she said. "It would be lovely to branch out to hot smoking as well."

Hot smoking, used for chicken, duck and pigeon, is a completely different process from cold smoking.

"There's a cooking process as well," explained Lynne.

Cold smoking, meanwhile, is the process they use at Kingcombe Smokery for their salmon.

"We start off with the best quality product," said Lynne. "Rick Stein uses it too."

The salmon in question comes from Loch Duart in Sutherland where the farm aims to get as close in texture and taste to a wild salmon as you can get by farming.

"They are farmed in lochs as sustainable source and approved by the RSPCA's Freedom Food welfare scheme," said Lynne. "They've been swimming against the currents all day. Often with the salmon you see in the supermarket you'll see a lot of fat in it. But the stuff we've got bears no comparison."

David talks me through the salmon's journey from loch to plate. "The fish is couriered down overnight immediately after it has been caught," he began.

"It comes refrigerated and caked in ice and normally we have about 40 sides at a time, once a week. I cure the salmon in specialist salts and sugars and after 24 hours of curing, the salmon is washed and dried and immediately put into the smokehouse where it is cold smoked very lightly over oak shavings."

"Don't say how long for," interrupts Lynne, "it's smoked until it's done."

Historically in smokeries in the western world, the smokehouse is a small building, which is well-separated from other buildings both because of the fire danger and because of the smoke emanations. In Kingcombe, the process takes place in an outbuilding, or, more accurately a large wooden box in an outbuilding.

"From the box comes a pipe," explained David, "that comes out and along here," he said gesturing to an imaginary fire, where oak shavings smoulder. The smoke from the fire feeds down the pipe into the box.

David continued: "The whole idea is that there is not heat on the fish.

* Continued from page 13 "The fire is not a furnace and it is important to keep the same continuity and quality of heat."

Even tiny variations in the procedure can change the taste of the fish. The wood shavings used play a part in the process. In Europe, alder wood is the traditional smoking wood, although oak is more often used now, whereas in the US, in addition to these two, hickory, mesquite, pecan, maple, and fruit-tree woods such as apple, cherry and plum are commonly used for smoking.

"In Norway, where my husband found out how to do it, it was not easy because every single guy had his own recipe, but there was one that was particularly good."

Now the smokery sells privately to the caterers, restaurants, and gastropubs.

"Leslie Waters has had it for her hotel school. Victoria Bashford-Snell has bought it and they buy it at Winyard's Gap - the chef there is fabulous," said Lynne.

At £24 for two pounds of salmon, Kingcombe's product is not cheap, but then it is difficult to put a price on ambrosia. I would hazard a guess that Minto Wilson, who died while on a fishing bank of the Tweed, would have been proud of his legacy indeed.

11:54am Monday 31st March 2008

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