Fresh Trout Roes
To start with you need trout roes. Now I am not sure whether you can buy trout roes, I suspect they are hard to find but clearly you can buy other fish - cod, pollack etc. To buy whole smoked cods roes is unbelievably expensive £75 for a whole roe isn't unusual. When you look at the actual roe content of shop bought taramasalata its around 20%. Where they get the pink colour from I do not know as that is certainly NOT the colour of smoked roes!
Salted Roes
Stage one you need to salt the roes which starts the curing process and removes much of the water in the roes and turns then from sloppy roes to solid roes. Now I have no idea how long to salt them. I saw just one recipe for cod's roes which are much bigger and that suggested 8 hours. I saw another recipe for salted roes which suggests salting for up to 7 days but that is to totally dessicate the roes and allows you to store them indefinitely as they are totally moisture free. You can use these as a flavouring which is something I will try next time. I am going to salt them for about 24 hours. You need to lay them on kitchen towel and keep salting them and removing the moistened towel regularly as the salt pulls the moisture from the roes.
Salted Roes after 15 hours of salting
After salting the roes, you need to wash them thoroughly but they are still quite salty which you would expect. Next step is to smoke them and I used my hot smoker for this. The hot smoker is basically a metal box with a sliding lid with two meths burners underneath. I use a mix of wood dust (from Chilboton Smokery) containing majority of oak but some apple and alder. The burners normally last about half an hour but the dust will carry on smouldering for a good half an hour after that. I left the roes in the box until the box had cooled, roughly the whole process took about an hour.
Hot Smoker
The roes came out well, smoked and not overly 'cooked' which was my main concern. The roes had now taken on a copper colour and smelt wonderfully smoky and fishy at the same time. Now at this point I enlisted the help of Andy as I had never made Trout Taramasalata before (well neither of us had) so it was a bit of an experiment. 
Smoked Roes
Unlike cod the roes weren't in a leathery sack, the smoking hadn't rendered them leathery just firm so we decided to blend all the roes together with some oil, paprika, lemon, touch of cayenne pepper and breadcrumbs to give the taramasalata some body. The taramasalata comes out a light brown colour, none of your violent pink colour here. God only knows how they make shop bought tara pink as there is no part of the process of smoking anything that will turn it pink as you can see. This is the colour it should be and the taste is seriously fantastic. If you're around over the next week or so then you'll be able to sample this at The Mansion but once it's gone it's gone sadly.
Blending the roes mixture with the breadcrumbs
Trout Taramasalata
The trout is served with toasted bread, lightly oiled and a wedge of lemon. We have been experimenting with trout for sometime now, finding new and interesting ways to serve it. This definitely takes it to another level. The Trout Taramasalata is served as part of a trio of trout using which we vary with either potted trout, hot smoked trout pate, cold smoked trout pate, beetroot cured gravadlax and trout cerviche. The next post will go through the process of smoking trout and how to make gravadlax and plating up the trio of trout. So if you are a keen fisherman and are running out of ideas on how to serve trout hopefully this will come in handy. And bear in mind it doesn't have to trout...
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