Smoking Food: How To Add More Flavour Beyond The Barbecue

You don’t need a 12-hour brisket, a giant smoker, or the better part of a weekend to get into smoking. Sometimes all you need is a bit of wood, tea, hay, or even butter.

Remember when your parents told you smoking wasn’t cool? Well, they were wrong. Or at least they were if they were talking about it in a culinary sense, because smoking is one of the coolest things there is. Now, what comes to mind when I say “smoking”? Probably an enormous brisket or a big, vaguely locomotive-shaped cooking appliance. But what smoking really is, is just another way of adding flavour, and when you start thinking of it that way, all sorts of possibilities suddenly start to open up.

The difference wood makes

Let’s start with wood, because that’s probably the medium most people are familiar with when it comes to smoking. Not all wood is the same, and the type of wood you use can in fact have a pretty noticeable effect on whatever it is you’re cooking.

Fruitwoods such as apple and cherry tend to be on the gentler side, bringing a slightly sweet, mellow smokiness that goes particularly well with things like pork and poultry. Hickory, meanwhile, is considerably more assertive, with a deeper, more bacon-like character. Then you have mesquite, which is about as subtle as a car crash. Bold and earthy, it’s a wood that needs to be kept an eye on because it’s more than capable of completely overpowering your food if you get carried away. But wood is really just scratching the surface.

You can smoke more than wood

Once you realise that smoke itself is the ingredient you’re after, there’s no particular reason to stop at logs and wood chips. Chinese cooking has long made use of a rather ingenious smoking mixture involving black tea leaves, raw rice, and brown sugar. What they do is they put it beneath a rack in a wok and heat it up. Before long, the mixture starts producing a fragrant smoke that can work its way deliciously into things like chicken, duck, or fish.

You can also throw dried herbs and botanicals into the mix, with rosemary stems, cinnamon sticks, and even dried corn cobs all liable to contribute their own aromas, lending something a little different from the usual campfire character.

Then you also have the French technique of smoking food with dried hay, or au foin. It’s particularly a treat with things like cheese and potatoes, where it imparts a soft, grassy, and slightly floral character to them that somehow tastes as if you marinated them in the summer pasture.

Things you wouldn’t think to smoke

And you don’t even need a massive hunk of meat to make smoking worthwhile. One of the more useful little tricks to know is that fat is particularly good at absorbing smoke, which is why cold-smoking things like butter, cream, olive oil, and even flaky sea salt can be such a fun way to introduce smoky flavour into everyday cooking.

With meat and fish, you’ll sometimes hear about something called a pellicle, which is essentially a slightly tacky surface that forms on the outside of a protein and gives smoke something to cling to. It’s kind of like nature’s version of Velcro, but heaps more delicious, and you can take my word for that.

We don’t tend to think of it as one of the more accessible cooking methods, and that’s a shame really. We need to dispense with the notion that one might need to spend thousands on a smoker that’ll see only occasional use at best, or that preparing a brisket in this way will eat up the better part of a weekend.

Because at the end of the day, whether you’re working with a backyard grill, a wok, or even one of those little handheld smoke guns, a bit of smoke can take something as mundane as butter, salt, or a potato and turn it into a highlight in and of itself. Maybe, much like we do, sometimes all our food needs is a little time around the fire.

Opening image: Valeriia Yevchinets | Pexels