Smokeandumami started off as Nick’s personal food blog. A few years ago, Lap (@oishinboy) also started posting here and started to shame Nick with the frequency of his updates.
Nick’s Biography
I live in Birmingham and am generally obsessed with food. I enjoy curing and smoking at home on my Bradley smoker. I’m generally finding that there are few things that aren’t improved by either a spot of curing or a spot of smoking, or maybe both. In 2011 we ran a pop-up Jewish style deli called Popstrami for a day with some friends. I get asked why we did it, and the reasons are not clear to me, but I did really enjoy curing and smoking over 20kg of brisket. Other than curing and smoking I love Spanish food, and it was the first Moro cookbook that seriously got me interested in food. I am also a big fan of Korean and Japanese flavours after a recent visit there. I love going to the local farmers markets at Harborne and Moseley and seeing what’s on offer there, the West Midlands is a great source of quality meat and vegetables. I do this for fun, not profit and I object to blogs that are thinly-veiled adverts for products.
Lap-Fai Lee
I am Robin to Nick’s Batman. We are here to save Brum from cooking and dining mediocrity because we all deserve to eat better.
Hello there, love the pics – can I use them for The Curlew newsletter, please? Paul, Jack PR.
Sure no problem, but a link/acknowledgement would be great!
Hello,
“In 2011 we ran a pop-up Jewish style deli called Popstrami for a day with some friends.”
No wish to renew the experience? (please say yes!).
Tomorrow I’ll try your advise: New Ye Sum.
The Han Dynasty (Station street) has a wonderful dish with aubergines and minced meat and chillies, or a (slightly too) sweet crispy sea bass. Problem is that you leave the restaurant with a rather persistent smell of what you (and others) have just eaten!
Thank you and bravo for your beautiful blog.
Nathalie
Hello Nick,
Sending Cork info via this medium as I think twitter would be too fiddly. Maria, my Cork source, said:
“Cork is a huge county, I think one of the biggest in Ireland. Do you know where your friends is going? By foodstuff what do you mean, grocery or restaurants? There’s some great cheeses made in Cork, a famous one is Durrus cheese. Then there are great sausages and Klonakilty black and white pudding. I don’t know that many great restaurants only those close to where we stay in West Cork, nothing more than what can be searched on the internet. I can ask Shona my sister in law if you need more specifics. Let me know.”
Hope this is useful – let me know if you would like more details. Maria is in Birmingham atm and will to going to Cork in August.
Regards
L
Hi,
just wondered if you had any recommendations for someone to start smoking? There appears to be a massive range of options for equipment. Do you have a recommendation at the lower end of the pricing spectrum? I want to make sure I can do it properly before upping the anté to your level!!
thanks
Matt
Hi Matt
Are you looking at doing cold-smoking or hot-smoking? A cheap way of getting into cold-smoking is to invest in the ProQ cold-smoke generator (http://www.macsbbq.co.uk/CSG.html). If you want to do hot-smoking the cheapest way is with a stovetop smoker e.g. a Cameron (http://www.forfoodsmokers.co.uk/acatalog/Stovetop_Smokers.html) but you will find it limited in terms of temperature control and cooking area for many BBQ classics like pulled pork and brisket. A better optin is to invest in a good quality kettle barbecue such as a Weber OneTouch which permits you to set up for indirect heat by laying coals over one half of the cooking area, and placing the item to be smoked on the other half. This also doubles up as an excellent barbecue. Many people get started this way. However it’s quite a lot of effort to maintain low and slow cooking temperatures for a long time. Going up a level you will want to look into a reasonably priced vertical water smoker such as the ProQ range. The Amigo is the best priced version (http://www.macsbbq.co.uk/Water%20Smoker.html). There’s also the Bradley smoker which takes a lot of hassle out of smoking but is quite expensive to buy and run.
The Weber barbecue book has a pretty good guide to the options in it (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Webers-Complete-Barbecue-Step-step/dp/0600621111).
HTH
Nick
I invested in the Bradley smoker (with digital control) and it’s the best investment I’ve made since I built my wood fired oven. It is bit pricey to run due to the cost of the smoke bricks, but it’s a good place to start smoking. Use it for a couple of years until you get the hang of smoking and then trade down to a more manual smoker what will be cheaper to run and by that time you should be able to smoke without wasting kilos of meat
As a newcomer to Brum, I saw your blog featured in the Redbrick, the UoB newspaper. Keep up the reviews, I love trying new places that aren’t the student dives of Selly Oak and broad street.