Festival Food: Hall’s Dorset Smokery

Like many of the food outlets that tour the UK’s festivals, Hall’s Dorset Smokery has gained something of a following among music fans.

Halls’ unique selling point is that for the past six years they have smoked food on-site, using a Hot Smoking technique that involves smoking food over smouldering wet oak chips. After Hot Smoking, the food is chilled. This prevents overcooking and enables the smoke residue to marinade into the meat.

They offer lightly smoked salmon, bacon, chicken and brie, in wraps and bagels. Their bacon, brie and cranberry bagel is especially well thought of (if social networking sites are anything to go by). At some festivals they also smoke mackerel.

At the Green Man Festival last weekend, I had the smoked salmon bagel with pepper and lemon juice (£5). The lightly smoked salmon tasted delicious and the bagel oozed cream cheese. It was very good.

Hall’s source their pork, cream and cheese from Dorset, their brie from Somerset, and their salmon from Scotland.

Owner Richard Hall is used to dealing with Environmental Health Officers and keeps a very high standard of food hygiene (he passes weekly checks at different sites with flying colours: see the interesting article on rising food standards at festivals below). Apparently, Glastonbury in 1970 was the first rock festival to be reported on by environmental health inspectors. Those inspectors would have been amazed by today’s festival food standards.

In addition to Green Man, Hall’s Dorset Smokery’s summer 2011 tour has taken in Glastonbury, Sonisphere, Download, The Big Chill, the Rhythm Festival and Womad.

With their expertise in freshly smoked food, Hall’s has the “boutique” festival circuit’s smoked meats needs well and truly covered.


Source for Hall’s Dorset Smokery and food hygiene info:
http://www.cieh.org/ehn/the_chilling_fields.html