From oily fish to quail's eggs, smoked items are a fixture on restaurant menus. But what if you could make something equally as good, if not better, at home? "It's actually straightforward," says chef and restaurateur Mark Hix, peering into his smoker on the roof of Selfridges in London. "I started smoking my own fish at the end of my garden – with the cat always sniffing around – when I opened the Chop House in Clerkenwell." He initially did enough smoked salmon to supply not just his four restaurants and Selfridges Food Hall, but also Richard Corrigan, who serves Hix cure smoked salmon in his restaurants. "I used to deliver it on my scooter," he says. Now, they smoke "about 100 sides of salmon a week".

Buy a smoker
"Buying a smoker is a great investment," says Hix. "You can find them online for a few hundred quid and, for that, you'll get infinite rewards. There's no limits to what you can try – not just fish, but bacon, hams, even goose breasts, which I do at Christmas time."

Hix uses a Bradley, which can smoke either hot or cold, and you can pick one up, new, for around £300 on eBay. If you can't afford that, though, fear not. "You can get great results using more crude methods," Hix explains. "Just find yourself a little old fridge or even an old kitchen cabinet. There are great step-by-step guides online on how to convert them into smokers. The key is practice but, if you're anything like me, it'll become an obsession."

Find a cure
Hix tried different cures and smoking times – "smoked salmon is equally about the cure flavouring and the smoking" – before settling on a 50-50 mix of applewood and oak chips. For the cure, he suggests "a dry mixture of 20% molasses sugar and 80% rock salt to sit your pin-boned salmon fillets in for 10-12 hours. Take them out, wash them, then cold smoke for about 10 hours." For hot smoking, the cure and initial smoking method is the same, before "the fire boxes on the smoker are lit towards the end and the fillets cook through".

Lazy? Skint? Then cheat
"You could get decent results by using an old biscuit tin with a wire rack in it," Hix says. "Throw a couple of handfuls of wood chips in the bottom, maybe some woody herbs, season and oil the fish, place on the rack, and cook for about 10 minutes on the hob with the lid, pierced several times, on. It won't be perfect, but there'll be flavour. Just don't forget to open the windows."

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