Which smoking chips to use

On the mild side are fruit woods, like apple, peach, cherry, and pear, which might impart that sweetness your friends swear by, but are subtle enough to use with lighter foods like poultry or fish, and sometimes pork.

In the middle part of the spectrum are woods like hickory, maple, pecan, and oak. They're great with pork, and strong enough to stand up to beef and game meats. Purviance's personal favorites to smoke with are hickory and oak. Finally, there's the strongest wood of all, and it's in a category all its own: mesquite.

Which leads to the biggest mistake most people make: over-smoking their food. Though smokiness can lend a diabolic richness to food that can transform a decent hunk of flesh into a transcendent repast, too many grillers have forgotten that when it comes down to it, their guests want to eat meat, not smoke.

Otherwise, you risk overdoing it. People also tend to forget that smoking isn't just about adding flavor, it's also about adding an appealing hue to the meal. Avoid pine and other soft woods, which give foods a bitter tar-like flavor. Pellet smokers burn pellets of compressed hardwood sawdust; electric smokers use coarse sawdust or sawdust disks; stovetop and handheld smokers burn straight hardwood sawdust. A lot of ink and possibly blood has been spilled about which wood works best with which food.

The truth is that, except mesquite, most hardwoods produce similar smoke flavor. Pit masters traditionally use local wood, which is why Texans smoke beef with oak, Carolinians cook pork shoulder with hickory, Midwesterners use apple, and people in the Northwest smoke with alder and cherry.

Nonetheless, over the years, certain woods have come to be associated with traditional smoked foods. The short list includes:. Wood Configuration. Wood chips have a short burn life, which is why they should be a last resort. Three to four-inch wood chunks burn longer than wood chips and mix well with charcoal. Small splits are long, thin wood pieces that burn evenly and yield consistent smoke. Should I Soak My Wood? Simply put, no. You might also like how-to--apron. It's important to have a clean burning fire and much of that starts with air flow.

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