I’ve been making a lot of Gordon Ramsay’s pappardelle with smoked trout and tomatoes recently. (Oh yes, we on The Times are nothing if not loyal. You didn’t expect me to be extolling the joys of Loyd Grossman’s cook-in sauces or Ainsley Harriott’s cup soups, did you?) It’s a blindingly quick and easy recipe – blitz together some garlic, shallots, plum and sun-dried tomatoes with olive oil and lemon juice, toss it through your pasta and flake in some hot smoked trout, and in moments you’ve got an instant crossover hit, as good for children’s tea as it is for a grown-up dinner.

Anyway, the point is, and what our Gordo provides no answer to, is how you’re supposed actually to flake most of the smoked trout you’ll find in the supermarkets. It’s such a low-grade squidgy, gummy mess you might as well squeeze it out of the vacuum pack like toothpaste. Same thing with smoked mackerel: a mushy, flaccid travesty that will never win over a new generation to the joys of a well-smoked fillet of omega-3.

For that, you can’t do better than visit Brown and Forrest in the Somerset Levels, where you can see how it should be done. At its busy shop/café, you’ll find locals and holiday-makers taking refuge from the nearby A303 over simple plates of smoked duck salad or smoked eel on toast. As owner Jesse Pattisson says, there’s no mystery to the smoking business. “What we do here isn’t rocket science, it’s just an old-fashioned way of finishing off a quality product. We’re not trying to make ordinary food taste fantastic, we’re just adding something to make great food taste slightly different.”

They’ve been hand-smoking over beech or oak for three decades, using a system that hasn’t changed in 100 years. Eels, trout, duck, chicken and anything else that needs cooking are hot smoked over a fire which is then damped down with sawdust to create more smoke. Cold smoking is done over a much longer time (up to 20 hours for Loch Duart salmon), in what is essentially a re-creation of the outdoor privy, which is what Jewish immigrants to the East End used as smokeries at the turn of the last century. The aim is to create a product that tastes of itself, with just a subtle taste of smoke behind it. “If you have to grip the furniture and your heart pounds as you eat it, you’ve gone too far,” says Pattisson.

The mainstay of Brown and Forrest’s business is eels. Every year Pattisson will take 40,000 or so from the chalk streams of Wiltshire, Hampshire and Somerset, and then hot smoke them over a beechwood fire, with apple twigs added for the last 20 minutes for sweetness. “They go down very well at tastings, although we never put out the smoked eel label. People can still be funny about it – until they taste them.”

His trout is, of course, as firm-textured as you could hope for, which he puts down to the individual attention a small smokery can provide. The fish come from a farm in Devon where they are grown at rates – and to stocking densities – Pattisson specifies, resulting in a more muscular fish. “Then you watch the fire, watch the smoke, and as soon as the fish starts sweating, you know it’s cooked, and that’s when you kill back the fire.” He makes it look easy, but he spent five years learning his craft. Even the direction of the wind can affect how long you must cook them for. “On a windy day in October, you can turn smoked chicken breasts into walnuts in seconds if you are not concentrating. But I’ll taste everything we produce, and if the trout is overcooked, it will just go into pâté instead.”

Brown and Forrest, Bowdens Farm, Hambridge, Somerset (www.smokedeel.co.uk). Mail order and restaurant reservations on 01458 250875

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