Do not Overlook This Professional Recommendation When Selecting Wooden Chips

Smoking meats is a good way to make them extra tender and obtain flavors you will not get with regular grilling. In case you’re not a heavy smoker (within the culinary sense) and also you’re turning your grill right into a smoker to experiment earlier than investing in the true factor, it is attainable that you have not significantly thought-about what wooden you have to be utilizing. Wooden is wooden, proper? Not likely, because it seems — there’s hickory, maple, mesquite, applewood, and cherrywood, and people are just some selections. Totally different wooden chips make your meat style totally different, considerably much like how barrel-aging spirits or grilling with cedar planks can impart particular flavors.

For some recommendation on selecting wooden chips, Chowhound spoke solely with Wealthy Parente, chef and proprietor of Clock Tower Grill in Brewster, New York, which he runs along with his spouse, Cassie. The couple additionally owns the close by Clock Tower Farm, the place they increase pigs and sheep for his or her farm-to-table restaurant. In response to Parente, the meat you are working with determines the wooden chips you wish to purchase. “Pork and hen are milder and go effectively with a lighter type of wooden, like applewood and different fruitwoods. Pink meat is heavier and might stand as much as extra aggressive smoky flavors of woods like mesquite and hickory,” he says.

These fruitwoods that Wealthy Parente mentions are recognized for including a really gentle sweetness to meats (or, no less than, they lack the bitterness of stronger wooden chips). It’s possible you’ll not get precisely the identical style because the fruits these timber bear — applewood does certainly come from apple timber — however applewood and cherrywood can impart fruity tastes that linger within the meat. These lead to a special expertise from hickory, which has a powerful, nearly savory taste that folks typically evaluate to the style of bacon. Fashionable wooden varieties like oak are extra versatile and simple to make use of for a common smoky style throughout totally different meats. In case you’re simply beginning out in your meat-smoking journey, you may wish to decide up a number of forms of wooden chips, like this bundle of 4 from Western Premium BBQ Merchandise, to expertise these taste variations firsthand.

Keep in mind that how lengthy you smoke your meat issues and totally different forms of wooden for smoking produce totally different quantities of smoke. A few of these stronger woods like mesquite require a shorter cooking time due to how a lot smoke the wooden emits whereas burning. In case you go away your meat sitting in that smoke for too lengthy, the flavour will develop into bitter in an unappealing, overpowering manner. Past that, the wooden chips you finally use essentially the most will develop into a matter of choice — you will discover out shortly which of them you want finest.