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bryan

Smoke Daddy

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Re: Smoke Daddy

I have never tried one but I am not sure why you would need it with the KK. Just cut some smoke wood up in chunks the size of your fist or you can buy it cut up from different outlets such as Lowes, Bass Pro, Home Depot etc. The more smoke you want the more chunks you throw on the fire. I often mix woods together for low and slows depending upon the type of meat I am smoking or I will use smoke wood when I sear my steaks.

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Re: Smoke Daddy

smokykensbbq: when you put your wood in amongst the charcoal like that do you soak it first, or it still gives off smoke from dry?

I've been soaking wood chips in water for up to an hour, then putting them on top of the charcoal in a open top foil pouch, which seems to have been working pretty well.

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Re: Smoke Daddy

There is quite a bit of dispute about whether or not there is any value in soaking wood prior to smoking. Check around on the net and see the arguments.

We talked about the plateau on shoulders and briskets. Is there a "plateau" for smoke? The wood is only going to smoke after the water has evaporated. So at first heat energy is being absorbed by the water, which then vaporizes, and then the wood, which is now in it's original dry state, reaches combustion temperature, and starts smoking. So what did we gain by soaking the wood? We used energy from our fire to drive the moisture out of our soaked wood to make steam. Energy that would have been used to cook the meat and fire the smoke wood had the moisture not been there from the soaking. If you just want to use up some of your fuel making steam, you might want to soak your wood chips.

I throw mine in dry.

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Re: Smoke Daddy

You make a convincing argument Michael :)

There might be one reason for soaked though. I'm doing quite a bit of longer, medium heat cooking, using the indirect method: refracting stone, drip tray on lower grill and food on top. With that combination it's almost impossible to add more wood for smoking, so by putting in soaked wood inside a foil pouch, it gives me about half an hour to bring KK up to constant temperature I want to cook at, which is when I put my food in. Thus, the smoking is 'starting' when the food is in. Otherwise, a lot of it would be burnt up first.

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Re: Smoke Daddy

Just about any wood that burns is going to have some acridity to it for the first few minutes. I think it better to get your smoke at the beginning of a cook but after the wood chips have a few minutes to burn off the harshness. So, no need to delay combustion by soaking the wood.

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Re: Smoke Daddy

I recall reading somewhere that the value of soaking smoke wood is that it extracts some of the water soluble chemicals in some wood types and make the resulting smoke more pleasant. I struggle with this concept since water cannot penetrate much more than 1/8-1/4 inch into the surface area of a wood chunk. Hence, even if the water soluble chemicals were leeched out by soaking, the vast majority of the wood never saw the water and would retain any offensive chemicals.

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Re: Smoke Daddy

I recall reading somewhere that the value of soaking smoke wood is that it extracts some of the water soluble chemicals in some wood types and make the resulting smoke more pleasant. I struggle with this concept since water cannot penetrate much more than 1/8-1/4 inch into the surface area of a wood chunk. Hence' date=' even if the water soluble chemicals were leeched out by soaking, the vast majority of the wood never saw the water and would retain any offensive chemicals.[/quote']

Seems to me that anything leached out of the wood would be missed. I've seen some pretty dark soak water-well,from back in the days when I soaked...

To some folx wood = cellulose+lignin and neither are much watersoluble

Wet OR dry I still had flaming/flarings.

My solution: foil wrap the wood and it won't flame/flare,and you get to unwrap free charcoal bits to use next time!

I'd be nervous putting over(t)ly wet stuff into the hot zone of a cast cooker anyway -thermal downshock has ruined meals for me before!

dub(OB SmokeDaddy: I see no use for one)

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