Captain Nils (Gus) Leaf spends all his time on a boat. Nathan Gould tends to stay in the kitchen. The two met during a striped bass handoff and are now cornering the smoked fish market on Island, one spread at a time.
“It turned from a creative idea, kind of off in the distance, and became reality real quick,” Mr. Gould said. “I’ve always been in food, he’s always been in fishing, but together it’s never been a business that either of us knew too much about.”
In a 12x16 smoking shed on Mr. Leaf’s property in Edgartown, freshly caught bluefish, yellowfin tuna and seasonal fish fillets are dry-rubbed in a way Mr. Gould equates to southern barbecue. The fish is then popped into the smoker for four hours over hickory wood chips. The fillets come out a caramel brown in a cloud of smoke.
Some of the bluefish and yellowfin are mixed into signature spreads. The goods are then taken to the farmers’ market, where they sell out every week.
Martha's Vineyard Smokehouse is a small operation, with the owners involved each step of the way.
”My fish come right out of my boat and right into the smoker,” Mr. Leaf said. “Boat to smoke, we like to say.”
Almost all of the fish smoked is caught by Mr. Leaf, a rod and reel commercial fisherman. Though he grew up on the Island, Mr. Leaf spent most of his career as a sheriff in Boston. Instead of picking up overtime for extra money he would fish. After retiring from the sheriff’s department in 2010, he decided to turn to fishing full time. On his main boat, Thumper, he reels in bluefish, bass, winter mackerel and summer bonita one by one, bleeding them immediately and putting them on ice. The immediacy of the process protects the flavor he said.
“If you catch one fish at a time, for one thing, when it comes onto the boat, you handle that fish immediately. It’s not like you have 100 fish on the boat that by the time you get to the 100th fish it could have sat out in the sun for five minutes, which could be a long time,” the 50-year-old fisherman said. “Our fish are instantly bled and submerged in an ice brine. Especially in bluefish it extracts the blood and oil out of the fish, so it really makes the bluefish not so gamey . . . it changes the whole flavor of bluefish.”
Rod and reel also protects the fish population.
“If it’s an undersized fish, it’s brought on the boat, the hook is removed and it goes right back into the water,” he said.
Mr. Leaf catches about 80 per cent of all the fish they smoke. They purchase mussels from Menemsha and yellowfin from offshore rod and reel fishermen that Mr. Leaf knows.
But it started with bluefish.
“The price on [bluefish] was so lousy,” Mr. Leaf remembers. “The fish were worth more than what I was getting paid for, so why don’t we start smoking them and get more for what we’re catching.”
Nathan Gould had been experimenting with smoking charcuterie while he was chef at the Harbor View Hotel. He arrived on the Vineyard in 2012 after living on St. John. A friend had suggested he might like working on the Vineyard, but when he visited in February he thought, absolutely not. However, he returned in August and took the job at the Harbor View. Later he became the chef at the Beach Plum Inn, and now the 29-year-old is a chef in Boston, but commutes back to the Island every other week to work on MV Smokehouse.
The smokehouse wasn’t their first time working as a team. Shortly after they met, Mr. Gould and Mr. Leaf teamed up for the Wild Food Challenge. Mr. Leaf provided all the fish and game for Mr. Gould’s Land and Sea charcuterie board. The response was so positive, they began taking the idea of a smokehouse seriously.
Jimmy Alvarado, their head smoker, has been with the company since they opened last year. Mr. Alvarado started as Mr. Gould’s sous-chef at the Harbor View, followed him to the Beach Plum and now to MV Smokehouse. His personal addition to the menu is a new smoked salsa, a thick pureed dip with a smoky finish and a kick.
Approximately 90 per cent of their product is sold directly to consumers at farmers’ markets. The other 10 per cent is sold to Island restaurants including Port Hunter, Mangku Truck, Isola and Among the Flowers.
Most important to all members of the Smokehouse team is the limited times the fish changes hands. At the moment, the only time the fish is out of their hands is during processing and they are in the process of building and permitting their own processing room.
The fish is caught around the Island, it’s smoked on the Island, it’s sold on the Island and it tastes very good on a cracker.
Find MV Smokehouse at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market on Wednesday and Saturday 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and the Falmouth Farmers’ Market on Thursdays from noon to 6 p.m.
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