The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Monday, December 8, 2014-3 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom Monday, December 8, 2014- 3A " : , ,, ... : r¢ ' r _r. sw VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily TOP LEFT: Durham's Tracklements employee Peter Arno prepares a fillet of salmon for display Saturday. TOP RIGHT: Durham and Arno work in the store. BOTTOM RIGHT: Durham cuts smoked salmon, one of the products sold at Durham's Tracklements. BOTTOM LEFT: A large fillet of salmon is on display at the entrance. SALMON From Page 1A ies. Judith Lowe, a Tracklements customer, has been around since the Ann Arbor grand opening. "About every two and a half or three weeks, I buy a large piece of smoked highland salmon," Lowe said. "And I also buy his smoked puissant, his smoked mackerel, his gravlax - most anything he's got is good." Florence Fabricant of the New York Times featured Trackle- ments in her Food Notes for their "trendier varieties" in 1994, not- ing the salmon was cured "Thai- style, with a ginger flavoring." "Actually they werent trendy- at the time," Durham said. "They were brand new. No one had ever done flavored varieties of smoked salmon. There was Scottish I smoked salmon, Swiss smoked salmon, Irish smoked salmon, Norwegian smoked salmon, but one thing they all had in common was that they were just smoked salmon." Now, however, "trendy" does seems an appropriate word. In addition to its review in the Times, Tracklements has been featured by Food and Wine and the Boston Globe, among others. They have mail-order customers on the East Coast and elsewhere, regular retail buyers in Ann Arbor and wholesale buyers too, Durham said. The flavor added to the smoked salmon, in innovative combina- tions, was the key that brought Tracklements the press and ensu- ing success. It was a marketing venture. "For a small and rather impov- erished smoker to start, it's impor- tant to have something that's eye-catching, that gets attention," Durham said. Another flavored variety with a ginger flavoring, like the one mentioned by the Times' Food Notes, is one that's cured in miso, a Japanese technique Durham read about in an old Japanese cookbook. "So we whipped up a batch of miso with a marinade, with tam- ari, with honey, some ginger and other things, and then started curing the salmon with a mari- nade of those, and it's been far and away our best-selling smoked salmon product," Durham said. "It happened within two weeks." At its core, Durham's process is one of refined trial and error. He reads cookbooks - many of which line the shelf below the cash reg- ister - he travels and he hires people with diverse food knowl- edge. But the crux of the process, the one that makes it all work, is the feedback he gets from his cus- tomers. "The great thing about Ann Arbor in terms of setting up a little boutique business like this is that there are a lot of people who are very avid foodies, to use the trendier term," Durham said. "I mean there are a number of neat things, but one very important thing is that you get immediate feedback from them about new products, so within a week or two you can tell if you've got a winner or a dog." Though it still happens occa- sionally, over the years the Tracklements team has evolved its process in such a way that makes "dog" varieties rare. From this stable process, com- bined with the different bits of food knowledge brought to the table by his team members in hodgepodge style, unique prod- ucts emerge. One such product is smoked salmon that tastes like pastrami. It's like eating pastrami that's healthy, Durham said. Tracklements tried this prod- uct a long time ago - when it was requested by a deli business in New York. Since then, how- ever, it's become Tracklements team member Ellen Wizniewski's "hobby horse." "It's really good, the salmon really takes those spices very well," Wizniewski said. "It's about eight or 10 spices, predomi- nantly paprika, and it just infuses the flavor for pastrami spice." Ellen Wizniewski has been with Tracklements for about seven years, taking time away only for a short hiatus in Ireland with her husband. She joined the Tracklements team originally after meeting Durham in the store's parking lot by the dump- sters. Her parents were among Tracklements' first clients at the beginning of the Ann Arbor phase, a time when they had few local customers. Tracklements team member Pete Arno brings bacon and other pork-related products to the table. He's an "Ann Arbor guy" who's worked with Tracklements for about three or four years now. One of the many sticky notes on the wall reads, "Pete's bacon - the best bacon I've ever had." Since 1992, Durham too has been bringing unique bits and pieces of information to the Tracklements table. Wizniewski said since college or before, Dur- ham has been a cook and a travel- ler interested in everything food and culture. "He's continuously questing for new ideas, and seeing how things come together, and channeling people's interests into creativity with his product," Wizniewski said. "He's really brilliant." The name "Durham's Trackle- ments" itself manifests the way bits of information converge to produce the Tracklements prod- ucts. It was coined by English culinary writer Dorothy Hartley to mean "a savory condiment to be served with meat." While Durham's Tracklements has only occasionally used trackl- ements like chutneys, relishes and mustards throughout the years, the word still reflects Trackle- ments' process of producing such widely renowned salmon for the followingreason: Hartleyevolved her word "tracklements" from the word "tranklement," which means "bits of things." Durham could loosely be called the Steve Jobs of the salmon food industry, pooling "bits of things" - information and people - in a way that maximizes creative out- He turned a hobby he picked up from Dunken Stewart - the manager of a cottage he rented in Scotland who was smoking fish that his friends had poached from some nearby sport fishing estates - into a flourishinglocal business in Ann Arbor, Michigan. However, Durhamreceives one common question: Why doesn't a local business like Tracklements get their fish locally, from the Great Lakes? "Basically, it's not as good for what we do, and it's not available year around," Durham said. "And a lot of people don't want it." Great Lakes salmon is a fresh- water fish, but as it doesn't have the same salt content, as ocean- bred salmon - it doesn't hold up as well. More than that, mail order customers on the East Coast especially have expressed their concern about pollution in the Great Lakes and contaminated salmon products. Bigger fish like salmon, being high up on the lake's food chain, accumulate more contaminants than would smaller fish in the same waters. So because Tracklements deals primarily with large fish like salmon, they count on farmed, Atlantic salmon. "Atlantic salmon has for a long time been at least widely per- ceived - and I think there's some real basis of fact in this - as the best for cold smoking," Durham said. As for the often controver- sial issue of farmed fish, in his cookbook The Smoked Seafood Cookbook: Easy, Innovative Reci- pes from America's Best Fish Smokery, Durham mentions that he has a rant prepared, one he calls "The bogus war againstfarm salmon." While he acknowledges that many complaints against farmed salmon do warrant attention, like "contaminated feed, color- ing agents with possible health implications ... and adverse effects on the local marine ecology," the industry has generally given all of these concerns the attention they need. Exemplifying their attention to detail, Tracklements gets the fish for their cold smoked vari- eties from the Faroe Islands, an archipelago cluster between Nor- way and Iceland on the Arctic Circle. Their hot smoked varieties they get from the Bay of Fundy, at the edge of the Gulf of Maine, between Canadian provinces New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In addition to their mail order and retail customers, Trackle- ments also has a large wholesale market, in the Ann Arbor area especially. Except for whitefish - one of the fish varieties Tracklements does not sell - they've provided neighboring Zingerman's restau- rant with all other fish varieties since 2008. Likewise, they've supplied Cafe Zola for around 12 years. But professional business con- nections with buyers of their products are not their only com- munity relationships. The Kerry- town local business community is "like a very small, incestuous family," Tracklements team mem- ber David Wells said. Wells' wife Mary Campbell is the owner of Everyday Wines, a nearby Kerrytown shop. "David's in and out of there, and we're in and out of there, they're in and out of here. So like David said, it is sort of incestuous, around food and wine," Durham said. Wells is aware that Durham and Campbell share "a philosoph- ical stance." "Small business forever," Dur- ham said. Beyond Durham, Wizniewski, Dominguez, Arno and Wells, Tracklements also has a few other part-timers, like Lucus Cole, the son of Kate Tremel, a woman whose ceramics brochures sit on the makeshift counter above the "Taking Holiday Orders" chalk- board sign. Tracklements generally has at least one team member in high school working; they often start in eighth or ninth grade and work up through university, Durham said. Cole, however, doesn't work all that often due to Saturday soc- cer commitments. In any case, Tracklements is holding up pretty well. "They have the best smoked salmon anywhere around, and they have a lotof other really good smoked products too, and they're really nice people," Lowe said. "They do things like going out of their way to really help you out with what you want and calling you when they've got what you need. They're just terrific." BROWN From Page 1A Brown's body lay on the street after he was killed. Students from the University's Black Law Student Association organized Friday's event. The demonstration followed a larger vigil on the Diag last week, which was attended by over 1,000 stu- dents, faculty and members of the community. Friday, more than 200 peo- ple registered for the event on the group's Facebook page and more than one hundred students turned out on the Law Quad. ' Law student Emerson Girardeau III, co-chair of the Black Law Student Association, said the student group wanted to create a space for University stu- dents to voice their opposition to police brutality and express soli- darity with protestors across the nation. Girardeau said the goal of the picture and die-in was to raise awareness about the issue of police killings. "There are still a lot of stu- dents across the campus and people across the country that are unaware and unconcerned about what's going on," he said. "It takes protests and it takes people voicing those concerns to make people aware." Britney Littles, another co-chair of the organization, stressed the importance of hold- ing the event at the Law School, as the issue revolves around a grand jury's decision not to indict the officers responsible for shoot- ing Brown and placing Garner in a fatal chokehold. "As attorneys, we have to go out and do the work that make sure these injustices don't hap- pen," Littles said. "Even if you decide to go to work at a law firm, whatever the case may be, we still have a responsibility to care about what's happening in this nation and make a change." Law School Prof. Samuel Gross also said the holding the event at the law school high- lighted the significance of the legal system in the situation. He said change can be fostered through the nationwide atten- tion following the protests around the country, though he said the change should occur by improving law enforcement training, especially when work- ing with minority groups that are more frequently subject to brutality. Though he expressed hope in bringing change through peace- ful protesting, he noted the country's fragmented policing system could pose problems in implementing new policies. Like many government insti- tutions, the criminal justice sys- tem is decentralized and locally run. Each local area has it's own set of police forces, ranging from very large forces in metro- politan cities such as New York or Chicago to places that have only a few officers. Because every state and local area has its own criminal code and policies surrounding police training, Gross said achieving nationwide change could be a challenge. "Getting practices to change across the entire country is very hard and takes quite a lot of time," he said. Business graduate student Stefanie Thomas said she attended Friday's event to bring awareness to what she called a racially biased police system and give voice to the underrep- resented minorities most affect- ed by the bias. "Regardless of your ethnic- ity, your race, you're interacting with police or law enforcement," Thomas said. "They're job is to protect and serve, I think that people should not feel threat- ened by it." LSA freshman Hadiya Wil- liams also said she wanted to bring awareness to the issue on campus in an effort to reshape the justice system and police training. "Things are going to change, it's not going to get swept up under the rug," she said. "We're going to protest things and let our voice be heard." Graduate students Tara Dosum Diener and Jasimen Bai- ley were solemn after the event. Bailey was moved to tears. Diener expressed the diffi- culty in having to explain to her children why the officers were not indicted. "This cannot keep happening, and it happened again today," she said. "This is ridiculous." Campus Mind Works Groups FREE mental health education and support groups for U-M students Stress Reduction to Improve Mood When: Tuesday, December 9 from 5:30-7:00 p.m. Where: Chrysler Center, Room 151 North Campus Visit www.campusmindworks.org for more information. Presented by the U-M Depression Center in collaboration with the College of Engineering and the Newnan Academic DEPRESSION CENTER Advising Center.