Smoking (cooking)

Hot-smoked chum salmonSmoking is the process of flavoring, browning, cooking, or preserving food, particularly meat, fish and tea, by exposing it to smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood.

[clarification needed] In North America, hickory, mesquite, oak, pecan, alder, maple, and fruit tree woods, such as apple, cherry, and plum, are commonly used for smoking.

Peat is burned to dry and smoke the barley malt used to make Scotch whisky and some beers.

Historically, farms in the Western world included a small building termed the "smokehouse", where meats could be smoked and stored.

The smoking of food may possibly introduce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which may lead to an increased risk of some types of cancer; however, this association is still being debated.

[9] Until the modern era, smoking was of a more "heavy duty" nature as the main goal was to preserve the food.

Large quantities of salt were used in the curing process and smoking times were quite long, sometimes involving days of exposure.

Although refinements in technique and advancements in technology have made smoking much easier, the basic steps involved remain essentially the same today as they were hundreds if not thousands of years ago.

[11] Cold smoking can be used as a flavor enhancer for items such as cheese or nuts, along with meats such as chicken breasts, beef, pork chops, salmon, scallops, and steak.

"[12] Cold smoking meats should only be attempted by personnel certified in HACCP [...] to ensure that it is safely prepared.

Cellulose and hemicellulose are the basic structural material of the wood cells; lignin acts as a kind of cell-bonding glue.

Some softwoods, especially pines and firs, hold significant quantities of resin, which produces a harsh-tasting soot when burned; these woods are not often used for smoking.

Cellulose and hemicellulose are aggregate sugar molecules; when burnt, they effectively caramelize, producing carbonyls, which provide most of the color components and sweet, flowery, and fruity aromas.

Lignin, a highly complex arrangement of interlocked phenolic molecules, also produces a number of distinctive aromatic elements when burnt, including smoky, spicy, and pungent compounds such as guaiacol, phenol, and syringol, and sweeter scents such as the vanilla-scented vanillin and clove-like isoeugenol.

When smoking using wood chips or chunks, the combustion temperature is often raised by soaking the pieces in water before placing them on a fire.

The main characteristics of the offset smoker are that the cooking chamber is usually cylindrical in shape, with a shorter, smaller diameter cylinder attached to the bottom of one end for a firebox.

Even large capacity commercial units use this same basic design of a separate, smaller fire box and a larger cooking chamber.

This design is similar to smoking with indirect heat due to the distance between the coals and the cooking racks, which is typically 24 inches (61 cm).

The temperature is controlled by limiting the air intake at the bottom of the drum, and allowing a similar amount of exhaust out of vents in the lid.

In a propane smoker, the heat is generated by a gas burner directly under a steel or iron box containing the wood or charcoal that provides the smoke.

These may be as simple as an electric heating element with a pan of wood chips placed on it, although more advanced models have finer temperature controls.

These devices house a heating element that can maintain temperatures ranging from that required for a cold smoke all the way up to 135 °C (275 °F) with little to no intervention from the user.

At the upper end of the trench is a vertical framework covered to form a chimney within which is placed the rack of foodstuff.

At the lower upwind end of the trench is lit a small smokey fire, and sustained day and night until the foodstuff is cured.

The motor and the combustion fan regulate the temperature of the smoker by feeding it more pellets and increasing airflow in the auger.