Why hello there! And welcome once more to Kitchen Catastrophe, an exploration of all the ways to eat your mistakes. Today we’re going to focus on a particular cooking method/element: Smoke, what it does, how you use it, and other things that make it sound like this is a smart education show, and not like, your half-drunk cousin giving you a rambling explanation about how his appliances work while you house-sit for him for a week. I’m your Three-Beers-Deep Dictator (but, like, “a guy who is dictating”, not like, a guy who rules things), Jon O’Guin, so let’s talk about smoking.

SSSSSomebody Stop Me!

 Alright, I think we’ve gotten The Mask references out of our system. Let’s do some learning before I start sining “Cuban Pete”...So, “Smoking” in culinary terms refers to the act of cooking, curing, or flavoring food through the application of smoke, duh. I…BELIEVE every culture has foods that use the technique (At the very least, I know that every continent does, and most major regions). There are smoked meats, grains, fruits, plants, dairy…just everything. I know a guy with a recipe for smoked ice cream.

It’s okay. Just don’t move. His vision is based on movement.

Smoking meats was very important back in the old days, since it allowed you to preserve meat, since there are a lot of complicated compounds in wood smoke that make it great at killing microbes and slowing meat decay.  It also has a lot of compounds that impart flavor .Wood smoke literally contains the same chemicals that give Vanilla its flavor, it often contains sugar compounds that essentially caramelize, and fruit trees often retain some of the same compounds as their fruit.  In short, it adds flavor and preserves food.

There are a couple methods for smoking, but I’m going to condense them into Cold Smoking and Hot Smoking. Cold Smoking is when the heat from burning the wood is NOT conveyed into the chamber with the foods which sit in a container at roughly room temp or colder. Warmer containers allow the food to absorb more smoke compounds…but then mean you’re leaving whatever the food is sitting out for hours on end to smoke, which can be hazardous. Keeping foods colder means it’s harder to smoke, but less risk of salmonella.  In fact, food scientists don’t recommend you try cold smoking at your own home at all…which is not a sentence I would have let me hear, because now it’s a CHALLENGE.

This is the face of a man ready for all challengers.

Seriously, though. The risks are potentially botulism or listeria. I will/would only do it if I was very sure I was working with grade-A ingredients, execution, and methods.  Which apparently I would need HACCP training to be certain of, and that’s a 16 hour course that costs $125, so that’s a long way out.

Interestingly, you can do something similar much safer, which is a cold smoke infusion, but we’ll get to that later.

Hot smoking is the process of partially cooking the food while you smoke it. Technically, it only applies if the food’s cooking chamber is lower than 180-200 degrees Fahrenheit, with anything above 200 degrees being “smoke roasting” and/or “barbecue”. But we’ve already extensively covered how complicated a word “barbecue” is, so some confusion here is to be expected. By using the low heat, you cook food low and slow, which is useful for breaking down various tissues, and you get more time exposing the meat to the flavor of the smoke.

That’s all pretty straightforward, so let’s talk about how you do it! 

A Steel Drum Band

Most commercially produced smokers will end up looking like one of four things: they will be a box/cabinet build, a standing cylinder, an egg or pill shape, or a sideways cylinder, maybe with a little hat!

It’s like a little train whistle!

The round designs are more commonly built because it’s just cheaper for the companies that make them, in so far as my meager research found. I assumed it was to do with avoiding build up in corners, and that round edges naturally funnel gases, but…gas kinda naturally funnels itself, so that’s not a great argument.

You can also “make” a smoking unit by setting up a grill for indirect cooking (ie, only turning on the burners/placing coals on the other side of the grill from the food) and placing a smoking pan or box (typically just a foil tray with some soaked wood chips) on the heating element. You can also, though this isn’t recommended, do it in like, your oven, with a similar set up. (it’s not recommended because your oven is, you know, inside, and the smoke will have to LEAVE your oven eventually. Technically, if you use a small amount of smoke, it can be done fine.)

My family personally has a Traeger offset pellet smoker. Which is a lot of words I’m going to walk you through.

If you need a break, get in the box.

Traeger is, as the capital might have indicated, the Brand name. Traeger. And to properly explain the company, I have to jump ahead to “pellet”: how a Traeger smoker/grill works is by burning hardwood pellets, which the company also sells. Basically, these are…well, they’re compacted sawdust of the wood in question.  The whole process is kind of hilarious, but basically, during the oil crisis of the 70’s, people started looking for ways to heat their homes that didn’t rely on oil or electricity. One invention that came about because of this was the pellet stove in the late 70’s and early 80’s: a wood-burning stove that used small compacted pellets of wood.  It produced less creosote, meaning it was less of a fire hazard, it was fairly efficient, and since it could be made with wood that would have otherwise been scrapped for sawdust, it was helping the environment and national efficiency.  After they were invented, someone ended up saying “well, if you can do that with a stove, couldn’t you do it with a grill?” That man was John Traeger, and he patented his pellet grill design in 1986, which lasted for 20 years.) The name Traeger has been known in my area for some time, because John Traeger lived in Portland Oregon, so Traeger grills were first sold in the area. (weirdly, the inventor of the pellet stove was from somewhere near Lynnwood WA, so my neck of the woods has been in the pellet game since the get-go.)

The grills are “offset”, because the box that contains the burning pellets is separate from the drum where the food goes (which you can see in the picture), connected by an opening for the smoke to pour through.  This is a pretty typical set-up, since it helps drop the heat of the burning wood (often 300-500 degrees) from affecting the drum too much, keeping the heat regulated.

My family’s traeger is, to my knowledge, fairly typical, with maybe a bit extra on the control box: while the original Traeger grills only had LMH controls (low-medium-high) ours allows us to set a temperature we want the drum to maintain.

Though, to be fair, it’s does include a “high” and arguably a “low” setting.

Other than that, there’s a grill (in the earlier picture, the grill was taken out to be cleaned) and then UNDER the grill, there’s a flat plate with raised edges: this is the drip pan. See, when grilling or barbecuing foods, one of the elements that adds to the flavor is the drippings: as fat renders from the food, it falls into the fire/onto the coals and burns. This produces small wisps of smoke made from the food being cooked that then float up, and flavor the food with its own smoke. Because of the relative size of the drum in the smoker, it’s too far for the falling liquids to hit the bottom and evaporate up again. Also, the flat nature of the bottom of the drum means excess liquid/solid deposits would just build up over time. The drip pan is tilted inside the drum, allowing excess fat that doesn’t evaporate to flow into a collection bucket to be handled later. You can also cover it with aluminum foil every time you grill/smoke, and then you never have to clean it.

Alright, I am hitting a wall, so I’m going to put in one last section, and then call it a night.  

The Smoking Gun

I mentioned earlier that there IS a variety of cold-smoking that it relatively safe and easy to do at home, called cold-smoke-infusing. And that’s true. And it also uses one of the weirder looking cooking tools of the new era.

A hair dryer?

That is, quite literally, a smoking gun. Let me explain:

Basically, what you do is you put whatever you want to turn into smoke into a chamber in the “gun” (in what looks suspicious like the bowl of a bong), and then take the hose, and place it in a container with the food you want to smoke. You can put normal wood chips/pellets, and also spices, teas, and other stuff. This is one of those areas where fancy restaurants are just going crazy. And the container can be basically anything. Like, “a bowl with plastic wrap on top” “one of those fancy dish covering lids”, “Tupperware or a Ziploc bag”, whatever.

Then you light whatever you have in your bowl on fire, and turn on the gun. The gun itself is basically a small handheld fan that pushes the smoke down the hose, into the container. Fill the air of the container, let it sit for a couple minutes, and then open it up.

“But Jon,” you ask, startling me as I started to pass out. “How does this work in only minutes, if smoking is a process that takes hours?”

“That’s easy,” I say. “It cheats.” See, the thing is, yes, it takes hours to properly smoke food ALL THE WAY THROUGH. This is like… sprinkling a pinch of smoke on before serving. You’re applying a thin layer of smoke molecules on the outside of the thing you’re making  (unless it’s a drink, in which case swirling or shaking it will get them inside as well.) The other thing is that the reason you want to get smoke into the meat/whatever is that smoke molecules dissipate over time. If I fully smoked a beef brisket, and kept it in the fridge for a week, it would be less smoky when I reheated it. This smoke blast probably dissipates in a matter of a couple hours. EVERY recipe I’ve seen for it makes it clear: you put this smoke on JUST before serving. It’s fun for showy tricks, and for surprising combos. In an unbelievable call-back, the place I checked out for reviews on the flavor impacts of the gun noted that their favorite of the recipes they tried was smoked Vanilla Ice Cream, meaning that multiple people have come up with that idea.

This is from a THIRD source that smoked Vanilla ice Cream! Spoilers: the process is too fast to add much color.

As far as gimmicky gadgets go everyone seems to agree: this little sucker is just BARELY worth it. So check it out if you have a love of smoke flavor and a spare $100. Me, I got like, 6 bags of pellets: If I’m smoking Ice cream, I’m doing it by the gallon, and just making an ice bath.

No time to plug stuff with links today, so just, you know, check out our social media and/or patreon, all at the top.

MONDAY: SHIT, I WAS SUPPOSED TO FIGURE THAT OUT, WASN’T I? UMMM…I RECENTLY FOUND SOMETHING I MADE BUT DIDN’T WRITE ON MY PHONE. MAYBE WE’LL DO THAT. OR SOMETHING. LOOK, I’M TRYING TO SORT ALL THIS OUT.

THURSDAY: IT’LL DEPEND ON WHAT WE DO FOR MONDAY. A PART OF ME WANTS TO DO A WEIRD BOUGIE THING.