Victoria Cosford
‘It’s like turning lead into gold!’, is how Damien Curtis describes the alchemy of smoking fish. Damien’s business, The Bay Smokehouse, has been selling locally-caught and -smoked fish fillets like tailor and mullet at local farmers’ markets these past six years or so and, more significantly, his award-winning (and utterly divine) Smoked Fish Rillettes, that are about to go national.
The thing is, this is no ordinary smoked fish and no ordinary fish smoker. French-born Damien grew up eating smoked fish, but it was a trip to Arnhem Land, where he and his wife were filming a documentary, that fired his passion. ‘I got a taste for smoked mullet’, he tells me. The whole primal concept of smoking fatty oily fish on fire – ‘the very Aboriginal experience’ – stirred something in him. Seeing that no one was doing much in the way of smoking wild-caught oily fish he glimpsed an opportunity, and began looking into smokehouses. This, in turn, resulted in a visit to Grimsby in the UK to train under a master fish smoker, where ‘I learnt a more advanced craft… using traditional kilns.’
Ultimately, research led him to the original fish-smoking kiln, the Torry Kiln (‘it transformed smoking fish’, Damien says, ‘it’s all uniform smoking’). Utilising a 1960’s manual from the British Library he had one custom built, a stainless-steel beast. ‘Now I’m able to smoke a lot more fish a lot more efficiently’, he says. He uses local pecan wood, ‘a native form of hickory’.
The main driving force behind his business was ‘to provide a local and wild-caught alternative to farmed salmon’, he says. As for those rillettes: Fingal Head-caught mullet, fatty and rich in Omega3 oils, smoked and blended with buttery local macadamias, it’s a star product – and once you taste it, you’ll know why!
The Bay Smokehouse is at New Brighton Farmers Market on Tuesdays from 8–11am, and Mulllumbimby Farmers Market on Fridays from 7–11am.
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