Today is a good day for smoked mackerel. Yesterday, while at the fishmongers, I just couldn’t resist buying two fresh mackerels – I just know how good they are going to be once smoked. But there was no time yesterday to even think about smoking them, what with all the paperwork resulting from a mindless dork ramming his jalopy into the side of my Mini, and the annual family dinner to celebrate my father’s (83rd) birthday. So I just brined them an put the submerged fish in the fridge. Today, there’s barely a whiff of wind, the sun is out, and the temperature is around 6°C, so I decided to fire up the smoker and make some delicious, honest-to-goodness smoked mackerel.
A couple of hours later, I have two beautifully smoked fish. Ready to be pulled for making rillette. The bones and heads go, as usual, in a bowl in the backyard, to feed the wildlife (which then gets filmed courtesy of our infrared wildlife camera…); the rillette goes in the freezer, ready to spruce up any meal that I feel will benefit from it.
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