THE BAY SMOKEHOUSE
‘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 6 years or so and, more
significantly, his award-winning (and utterly divine) Smoked Fish Rillettes, 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 the 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 on Tuesdays from 8 – 11am and Mulllumbimby on
Fridays from 7 – 11am
Victoria Cosford
