St. James Smokehouse | Saint Pure Salmon
St. James Smokehouse, which has operations based in Miami, Florida and Annan, Scotland, has had a big year in 2019 so far.
A producer of a variety of smoked salmon products, the company took home the 2019 Seafood Excellence Award for “Best New Retail” product for its Saint Pure Salmon. Hand-cured with locally-sourced Florida orange and grapefruit wood, Saint Pure Salmon is free of growth hormones, artificial preservatives, colors, and flavors, and is sliced vertically, sashimi-style, creating bite-sized portions, according to co-owner Brendan Maher.
The search for something different, something new, inspired the concept of Saint Pure Salmon, Maher explained in May to SeafoodSource, after the product earned a Seafood Excellence Global special award for “Retail Packaging.”
“I wanted to try something new. I’ll fall flat on my face trying to do something different, and I’ve got no one else to blame them but myself then, and I’m totally happy with that,” as long as it’s in pursuit of a fresh vision, Maher said.
Many of Saint Pure Salmon’s components bring a fresh perspective to the well-established smoked salmon market segment. For one, the product – which is comprised of Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC)-certified, sushi-grade Atlantic salmon that is cured with sea salt and brown sugar – is smoked with Florida orange and grapefruit wood, an over-abundant resource in Florida not often utilized by any industry, let alone the seafood sector, Maher noted.
“Florida is one of the biggest citrus-growing areas in the world, so they have millions of pounds of orange-wood, grapefruit-wood, lemon wood, that they don’t know what to do with, it has zero value [to them]. I’m in Miami, I’m in Florida, so I can repurpose that so it’s locally-sourced. It’s repurposing something that has no other use and there’s an abundance of it, so that’s where that idea comes from,” he explained. “The citrus growers have this adage that the tree should expend its energy growing fruit and not wood, so they continue to prune the canopy to a like a 12- to 15-foot diameter, leaving them with millions and millions of pounds worth of citrus wood."
St. James Smokehouse, when rendering Saint Pure Salmon, draws out the smoking timeframe to create a flavor profile with layers of citrusy nuance.
“Historically, seafood is seen as the fresher the better, and that is absolutely the truth – apart from smoked salmon. Because I can produce a product of smoked salmon in 24 hours, but it doesn’t taste as good as when I salt it for 23 hours, wash it off, leave it for 23 hours, then smoke it for 7 or 12 hours, and then – after smoking it – leave it for another day to let all the smoke and the salt fully permeate all the way through,” Maher said.
The product’s unique packaging incorporates a geometric shape made up of small holes, giving consumers a tantalizing window to the product within – all while hinting at the mechanics behind Saint Pure Salmon.
“In Scotland, in the smokehouse, and in Miami, I’ve got exactly the same smoker,” Maher said. “So the burner, where you actually burn the wood, has got this pattern on it on a steel plate. It’s got this geometric pattern, so I kind of honed in on that. That’s the point where the salmon ceases to be fresh salmon – it’s the point of no return, where it becomes smoked salmon. That place, the reason it’s got holes in it, is because fire needs oxygen.”
Photo courtesy of St. James Smokehouse
