Each week, the Gazette takes to the streets to unearth something being manufactured right here in Hackney. This week we spoke to Ole Hansen who uses a family recipe devised in 1923 by his grandfather, Norwegian fishmonger Lyder-Nilsen Lydersen, to hand salt and cold smoke salmon.
Ole Hansen set up his hand crafted smoked salmon business because he “wanted to bring back integrity to something lost through the 1980s and horrible mass production”.
The Norwegian set up Hansen & Lydersen in the rear room of the warehouse he was living in Shelford Place, Stoke Newington, with just £300 six years ago. Now the company has a turnover of over a million.
Rather then buying an expensive German or Danish smoking chamber which would just entail “pressing a button” to make the product, he decided to build a brick room using reclaimed materials.
“I rebuilt my grandfather’s smoking chamber design with my own hands,” he said. “I had the salmon when I was a little child on the Tundra. It’s an idealism of being local.”
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