“I’ll just throw something smart on,” Andrew Woodhouse tells me as he runs off to grab a creased chequered shirt to compliment his worn shorts. The financial events planner turned backyard smokehouse entrepreneur has just met me at the door of his basement flat in Honor Oak for the umpteenth time, greeting me with the same warm welcome I have been afforded since I ordered my first side of salmon from him during the deepest darkest days of lockdown in 2020.
Back then, with the nation’s boozers shuttered and furlough leaving out-of-work Brits with time on their hands, Andrew decided to pump his pint money into his passion, smoked salmon, and follow in the footsteps of the cured pioneers that went before him. Contrary to popular belief, smoked salmon is as native to London as pie and mash. As Lance Forman of H. Forman & Son once told me stood proudly in his behemoth smokehouse on the East End’s appropriately named Fish Island, Scotland might have supplied the salmon, but London brought the smoke.
The capital’s smokehouses were to fish what Kent’s hop fields were to beer. Through a requirement to preserve, they created a whole new taste, one that has become a mainstay on breakfast menus up and down the country – and across the world. But dependence on salmon has, invariably, created problems, many of which were aired in a stomach-churning way in Seaspiracy. It has prompted Andrew to eschew early morning starts in Billingsgate in favour of trout delivered from Hampshire, which is not only more ethically farmed but, he thinks, tastier too.
“It’s really nice,” Andrew tells me as we sit down in his living room for a chat. “It’s less oily and there’s a lot less grease flying around your mouth while you’re eating it. And being leaner, it’s also a lower calorie option for people.”
The fact that it is sourced locally also matters. It means no more being hauled out of a loch in Scotland, driven hundreds of miles down to the East End of London and being forced to put your trust in a trader who will do all he can to vouch for its freshness. “This way,” Andrew says, the fish has “literally been pulled out the water the day before it arrives” – ensuring much more transparency in the supply chain.
And unlike salmon, trout is farmed in a sealed or semi-sealed environment in-land, fed by rivers with water that leaves the farm in the same condition that it came in, providing a crucial interface with the natural environment around it.
It sort of begs the question, why aren’t we seeing more of it? Why aren’t the cafes, restaurants and bottomless brunch joints repping it as hard as Andrew is when, on the face of it, it is a higher-quality product? One of the problems, he tells me, is around perception. “I think in its pomp in the 1970s and ‘80s it was pretty popular, but it got this reputation as having a metallic or muddy taste, it didn’t have the cleanliness and the glamour that wild Scottish salmon had.” The other issue is that it is farmed on a small scale, which means the supply is still not quite there.
Thankfully, when you’re pumping out smoked fish from your backyard, supply isn’t your chief concern. But if Andrew’s Smokehouse grows any bigger it could well be, and growth is certainly on the cards. After giving up his full-time job, attention has quicky turned to how to scale up the business.
At the moment, Andrew operates out of a room at the back of his flat which houses a table and a fridge, and his garden, where his bike, trailer and four-foot smoker live. Upscaling will involve building a more advanced smoker with the ability to both hot and cold smoke – and eventually moving to new premises to allow him to produce more and, in his words, “get out of my girlfriend’s hair”.
Beyond that, Andrew has set his visions on the very cafes, restaurants and, dare I say, bottomless brunch joints that have shunned trout until now. With a fair wind and smooth passage through the quagmire of local legislation required to supply consumer outlets he feels confident he will soon have an approved premises within months, which is when his backyard operation could really come alight. Until then, you can order his fish by getting in touch via Instagram or via email here. We thoroughly recommend you do so.
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