Freshness is everything. One of our guiding principles at H. Forman & Son is that quality and flavour always comes first, and that means the very freshest ingredients prepared to order. Take our London Cure smoked Scottish salmon. We offer a version made with wild salmon – Genuine Wild – and a version made with Grade One farmed salmon.➻
Whether the salmon is wild or farmed it arrives in our smokehouse within 48 hours of being harvested in Scottish lochs or 24 hours of being netted in Scottish rivers. You cannot get fish fresher unless you catch it yourself. And it doesn’t hang around when it arrives. Every fish is cleaned, gutted and split immediately before the open flesh is dredged with rock salt to begin the cure.➻
Over 10 per cent of the salmon’s body weight is lost during salting and about the same again during air-drying in the kilns. The focus on eliminating moisture is crucial to creating the deep, rounded flavours of the London Cure. Smoking with pure oak logs ensures purity – oak chippings or sawdust can be too easily contaminated. The smoke provides a preservative coating called the pellicle, which is removed before slicing: your H. Forman & Son smoked salmon should not taste of smoke. The concentrated taste of salmon is what you pay for.➻
Whilst many of our customers receive our smoked salmon sides, whole and untrimmed, fresh from the kilns, the freshness story extends to the post-kiln processes, all of which are performed by hand by skilled artisans. The sides are trimmed, pin bones removed, hand-slicing carried out with incredible precision. Packing takes place at once and we distribute the finished product to you that very day. We don’t send you a pack we have on our shelves, because we don’t keep any products on shelves. Everything is made by hand to order.➻
