Smoke - What's it all about?

[DennisLinkletter]

Wood has organic volatiles, these are what creates the smoke or actually vapor that condenses on your meat to create the smoke flavor. When the wood is heated, different materials turn to gas/vapor at different temps.. Think of the burning process as destructive distillation of wood.

The first materials that turn to vapor are wood-tar creosote and tar acids. This smoke has very large particles, without oxygen it presents it's self as thick grey smoke. It readily sticks to your clothes and burns your eyes.. this does not taste good (except to Texans who design their rubs to counter/balance this bitter taste e.g. mesquite) I call this thick grey smoke, primary smoke. The vapor just after the grey smoke becomes translucent is what we're after..

This secondary organic material turns to vapor but this vapor is now translucent turning to transparent and in sunshine can appear to be blue.

This is the money vapor.. If you meat is the coolest object in the grill this vapor will condense on it. This will give your meat the added flavor profiles that make food cooked with charcoal so desirable.. You want to pair your wood and charcoal flavor profiles with your meat and rubs just like you pair your wine to a meal.

Hope this helps..

[tony b]

Re: Smoke - What's it all about?

While I understand this concept, there just seems to be something "ideal" about this and not particularly practical in the real world. The wood doesn't burn uniformly, so there's always a part of it that's producing the primary smoke as the burning front moves through the wood. Hopefully, you can reach an equilibrium state that is mostly secondary smoke and just a little primary, which suggests larger pieces of wood over smaller ones, especially over chips that burn up too quickly. (And we recognize the myth of soaking the wood in water first.)

This technique will likely work on short cooks (1 hour or less), with only one or two larger pieces of wood that can be started at the beginning and allowed to achieve money vapor before adding the meat. Hopefully the smoking wood doesn't burn up before depositing enough flavor on the meat.

However, if you scatter wood around the charcoal for longer cooks, you will be burning "fresh" wood at various times during the cooking process, which will be producing large puffs of primary smoke as it ignites.

All this points to the solution of using smoker boxes (converted dutch ovens, or the commercially available ones) to generate your smoke for longer low and slow cooks. You get prolonged generation, but can help burn off some of the primary volatiles that produce the less desirable flavors by channeling the smoke back into the burning charcoal first. Having been a recent convert (thanks to Syzygies' post), it seems to work for me, at least.

Lastly, Dennis' point about the proper rub/wood pairings is spot on, too!

[DennisLinkletter]

Re: Smoke - What's it all about?

First of all all woods have different flavor profiles.. Some of course have much more mild primary smoke and some will make smoke that makes your food inedible.

You have probably heard about my burning larger chunks of wood outside the the grill in a charcoal starter until the gas/biofuel is burned off.. then putting it into the grill. This is what a lot of old school BBQ joints do.. this ensures they will still have all of the secondary vapor that can be lost from over carbonization.

And remember that it's condensation that causes the vapor to stick to the meat so once your meat gets hot this transfer becomes less effective. That's why I always put me meat in as cold as possible if I'm cleaning up the smoke.. I think the chips are a total waste of time.. Poof and they are all gone..soak them and you get some steam first then same poof..