Smoking Fish!

Jan Levandowska could not leave the provision of smoked fish at his daughter's wedding to chance. He has been smoking fish as an intrinsic part of his way of life. When his daughter Karina was going to be married everyone knew, and were very happy about the fact, that Jan would be smoking the fish. 

 

So our journey deep into the heart of a Polish wedding began with the most basic of preparations: gutting and descaling 40 kilos of trout and 20 kilos of eels. I managed to help with some of the trout and was taught some, but not all, the secrets of smoking the Levandowska way. 

 

Perhaps the one secret that I can reveal without to much damage to the family's tradition is the use of sawdust in the process. Jan was busy slipping free the entrails from the body of the fish with a very sharp knife. He then tossed them one by one onto a large pile of sawdust. 

 

It was at this point that I offered my assistance as a completely unskilled labourer. Jan grabbed a fistful of sawdust and used it like a rag to rub up the body of the fish. This, he explained, descales the fish without breaking their skin, a fact that is crucial for the best flavour in well smoked fish. 

 

There we sat around a pile of gutted trout rubbing sawdust up their bodies to remove the scales and then chucking the fish into a large vat of cold water.