EMBER FIRED ASPARAGUS ON THE HIBACHI IS A PERFECT WAY TO ADD A GRILLING FLAVOR!
EMBER FIRED ASPARAGUS ON THE HIBACHI
Its Asparagus season and that means you should get the most out of this sensational vegetable while it’s fresh! Learn how easy it is to ember roast this thick skinned vegetable to bring out the fantastic flavor of this vegetable as a side dish, or used as an ingredient in other recipes like a refreshing dip, soup, or stuffing for meat or fish.
Fresh asparagus with thick stalks (or store bought is fine)
PREPARING TO EMBER COOK:
Clean the Hibachi or small charcoal grill unit of all previous ash, as well as any leftover wood and charcoal. Add the SmokinLicious®Grande Sapore® Wood Chips in the base of the Hibachi on the charcoal grates. If not using a Hibachi unit, then place the wood chips in the charcoal area of your small charcoal grill. I like to use Wild Cherry Grande Sapore® Chips to bring a balance to the asparagus’ flavor. Since I plan to use my roasted asparagus as an ingredient in other recipes, I’m using the chips in their natural state rather than soaking in a flavored liquid but feel free to soak in wine, alcohol, juice or other liquid of your choice.
LIGHTING THE FIRE
After loading the Hibachi or other unit with my Grande Sapore® Cherry Chips, I light the chips using a small kitchen size torch. I let the chips burn down until I have about 2-3 inches of hot embers to cook with. I need the layer long enough to accommodate the spears of asparagus and deep enough to ensure the embers encircle most of the spear. I keep plenty of extra Grande Sapore® Cherry chips on hand to ensure I get the depth and size of the ember bed throughout the cooking process. This includes maintaining a perimeter of unlit chips around the hot embers.
Kiwifruit gets smoky by adding a new twist to your kiwifruit by cold smoking it to enhance its wonderful sweet flavor.
KIWIFRUIT GETS SMOKY
Kiwifruit is now in season! It’s time to use this potassium, vitamin A, C & E enriched fruit in your favorite recipes. How about doing something to up the flavor level a bit?
Packed with more vitamin C than an orange and as much potassium as a banana, Kiwifruit, more commonly called kiwi, is also a fiber powerhouse. I’m going to take this creamy fruit favorite to a new flavor level by cold smoking it.
The Ease of Hand Held Food Smoking
To do this technique, you’ll need a handheld food smoker, SmokinLicious® Minuto® Smoking Wood Chips in size 6, 8 or 10, a lighter, a sheet pan, a food bag large enough to go over your sheet pan, and a cable tie. Then gather together the number of kiwifruits you’d like to infuse with smoke vapor, and have a knife and cutting board available.
Kiwifruit Gets Smoky by Letting the Smoke In
Simply cut your kiwifruit in half to allow the smoke vapor to penetrate the fruit flesh. As kiwifruit is covered by a brown, fuzzy skin, you will need some of the fruit’s meat exposed to get real smoke flavor incorporate. Otherwise, leaving them whole won’t bring much of a smokiness to the fruit meat.
What I love the most about cold smoking with a handheld food smoker like The Smoking Gun™ Smoker, is how fast this flavoring can be done to any food, beverage, liquid, spice or herb item. After cutting me kiwifruit in half to allow for maximum penetration of the smoke vapor, I place the cut halves on a sheet pan. I then slip a food bag over the sheet pan.
We have been an online shopping source since 2005! We promote quality products and living wages for our employees! Producing a list of food safe woods, bark-free cooking wood only from the heartwood of a tree! Our internet online business brings “fresh” products to you! Which is why we won’t sell product on Amazon!
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I won’t deny that I am just as guilty as the next person when it comes to wanting more out of every 24 hours I can get. This is the main reason why I am an internet shopper. I rarely frequent an actual retail store aside from a wholesale club to purchase office supplies and the occasional trip to the grocery store.
I also won’t deny that I am an avid Amazon.com shopper! Just about everything you can think of, I have purchased: clothes, specialty paint, make-up, kitchen supplies, food products, small appliances, area rugs – like I said, just about every category they offer.
So why aren’t SmokinLicious® products offered for sale on Amazon.com?
“Negative” Feedback Services
Today, there is literally a service for anything and everything. That includes services to pay individuals to post negative reviews on a seller’s product and services. Let me be clear. SmokinLicious® certainly has had negative issues arise from time to time in the past 13 years. When they occur, we have our own procedure in place for remedying the situation which often results in great appreciation from the customer and a brand loyalty relationship developing. However, when negative feedback occurs when selling on Amazon.com, it can take a little as .0008% reported issues of the total products sold to kick you out as a seller! Kicking you out means you’ve lost all the inventory costs you started out with as Amazon.com ties up your account.
Open Market for Copy Cats
As anyone who has been in business for themselves can attest to, you spend months working on verbiage for your products, photo imagery for a gallery, and unique header descriptors to bring attention and get you sales. The last thing you want is someone stealing your work and posting to a seller’s listing on Amazon.com. That can and has happened! When it does, you are obligated to show proof of ownership of all content if you want to bring issue against an Amazon.com seller.
Worse yet, the other seller may be allowed to continue to sell a product that looks exactly like yours but maybe lesser quality in similar packaging! Plus, it is easy for your photo to be high-jacked and replaced with another image to cause high percentages of returns. Remember, there is a return option that states the item “does not match description,” allowing the buyer to make the return easily while you get a demerit from Amazon.com.
Sinking Price Margin
By far this is the number one issue for my brand to use Amazon.com. For a good majority of shoppers on this site, they are price driven in their choices. Imagine SmokinLicious®Grande Sapore®wood chips going against the company that sweeps wood shavings off the floor from their flooring or cabinet making business, placing them in a cheap plastic bag, and slapping a simple label over the bag. That company can afford to list the price at $3.99 a bag when they have no extra costs involved for the material, just the cheap packaging. We are not in the market to compete on price. We are in the market to compete on quality and purity of product. That’s it!
For the brand SmokinLicious®, we are all about quality, safety, legitimacy, and value! Our goal is to enable anyone around the globe who enjoys wood-fired cooking to do without having to think about the cleanliness and type of wood. We’ve selected the safest hardwoods to cook with, stripped them of all the impure bark, reduced the wood to just heartwood so you have the fillet of the tree and dialed in the moisture so you have success at the grill, smoker or plancha every time. You’ll find us online 24/7 to fill your needs in North America, the UK, and soon, in South Africa and New Zealand.
I hope you gained a better understanding of SmokinLicious® and why we do what we do! Leave us a comment and subscribe to get our latest articles and information on recipes, techniques, and the science beyond the fire, smoke, and flavor.
Oak Hardwood Species is abundant in Our rich harvest area for the best hardwood cooking woods in the world.
THE BOLDNESS OF OAK HARDWOOD SPECIES!
New York State is home to the most varieties of Oak anywhere in the world! Currently, there are 16 native to New York State alone, with many more varieties having been brought into the state. In Central Park alone, there are 18 species of oak represented. Comprised of two subgroups – white oaks and black oaks – there is one key distinction between these groups. White oaks produce acorns that are usually sweet while black oaks produce bitter acorns. So how does this translate when using Oak wood for smoking?
At SmokinLicious®, we try very hard not to make flavor descriptors of each hardwood we manufacture into cooking wood, as we hold to the belief that there are so many factors that contribute to the reveal of the underlying wood flavonoids (i.e. temperature the wood is exposed to, other ingredients used on the food cooked over oak, moisture level of the wood, etc.). However, we do have a scale to guide the user on the boldness of flavor. Oak is at the highest end of that scale. It is the boldest flavor we offer!
Knowing that oak is a powerful flavor, I must remind you that smoke particles do not penetrate completely into the meat. In general, for meats, smoke vapor only penetrates about a 1/8” meaning the “flavor” you will decipher from the oak is actually to the outside area of the meat. Certainly, if you cook a meat until it can be shredded, you will mix the outside flavor areas with the less wood flavored inner meat and get a good balance to the smoky flavor.
Hardwood- The Boldness of Oak Hardwood Species
As I’ve tried to stress, cooking foods with a specific hardwood is the choice of the cook. I am not one to say that you can never cook a specific food with a certain hardwood. Everyone’s palate is different and tolerates different levels of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. I will, however, remind you that bold flavors need to be balanced and this can easily be done through the other ingredients incorporated with that food item or even on that food. This will allow you to use oak wood for smoking: cold smoking say beef jerky or game jerky, hot smoking lamb, goat or beef, grilling steaks of beef or pork, stove top smoking pungent flavors like onion and garlic, and handheld cold smoking say a robust cheese.
As always, very little quantity of wood is needed to bring forward the unique qualities of the wood and Oak, with its boldness, is not an exception. If you’re in the market for a very bold flavor, then go for the black oak varieties including Pin Oak, Scarlet Oak, and Red Oak. A step down from the black oaks, the white oaks include Chestnut Oak, White Oak, Swamp Oak, and Post Oak. Either choice will bring you hardwood offering that is strong in appearance, aroma, and flavor!
Our forest grown Hickory cooking wood blocks are center cut with NO BARK! Perfect sizing when you need a “chunky” piece of hardwood for smoking and wood-fired cooking!
HICKORY COOKING WOOD- WHAT A “NUTTY” CHOICE
Continuing our feature on specific hardwoods for the sole purpose of wood-fired cooking, let me introduce you to very popular choice, especially when it comes to hot smoking or pit roasting techniques and meats.
Hickory hardwood is part of the Juglandaceae family of wood better known as the Walnut family. The scientific names for the varieties we manufacture are Carya glabra (Mill.) sweet and Carya laciniosa (Michx.f.) but the common names for the varieties found in the Western New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania regions include Pignut Hickory, Sweet Pignut, Smoothbark Hickory, Kingnut.
Hickory cooking wood is most commonly used with animal proteins like beef (ribs, brisket), pork (shoulder, ribs), and game (elk, bison, moose, duck, deer). Its overall flavor profile is more significant with a moderate level of infusion. It often is described as having a bacon-like undertone. Because the overall infusion is on the stronger side, it works well when mixed with a lighter hardwood or fruit wood like ash, cherry, or maple to balance the use of Hickory with non-animal proteins.
The overall color that results from the smoke vapor of hickory cooking wood is on the brown or deep side.
Oh, and the answer is no, you don’t need to be concerned with the use of hickory cooking wood for those with a nut allergy. The trigger for an allergic reaction is contained within the nut themselves rather than the tree and occurs when the nut is cracked. So enjoy this giant of the forest and Bon-Bar-B-Q!
This is the year! You made a promise to yourself, family and friends that this outdoor cooking season, you were going to bring more flavor to meals cooked on the grill by incorporating smoking wood and grilling wood. All you need to know is, what are the options for setting up the grill for this type of cooking without purchasing a smoker?
We have the answer and lots of options to utilize your existing equipment!
LP/Gas Grills of All Types
There is a great deal of variation in LP/Gas Grilling equipment in terms of grilling surface space, the number of burners, BTU rating, etc. Know up front, that this will play into how frequently you need to replenish grilling or smoking wood or even to monitor the foods being smoked on the grill. Essentially, these tips will work on any brand/model that you may own.
How To Add Wood Chunks on Gas Grill
Heat diffusers are commonly found on newer models of grills. They are made of high heat tolerant metal and cover the actual burners of the unit. Their purpose is to ensure even heat distribution throughout the grill so both radiant and conductive heat is maximized.
Wood Chunks On The Diffusers
If you have a grill model that has heat diffusers (remember, they may go by other names like flavorizer bars, flame tamers, heat plates, burner shields, and heat distributors) then you’re ready to use smoking wood chunks on your unit! Yes, I said smoking chunks. This is by far the easiest method of getting the true smoke flavor to the foods being cooked. Plus, you can set up an indirect method of cooking using smoking chunks.
You will need 3-4 wood chunks sized to fit over your heat diffusers and under the grill grate when setting in place. A 2x2x3-inch size fits most units and these should have some measurable moisture level; at least 20% moisture is ideal meaning you won’t need to presoak the wood. If you have an old grill model before heat diffusers were standard, you can still use smoking wood chunks by placing them in a smoker box. These boxes will generally fit 3-4 chunks of the size referenced above but be sure to use a good quality box. My preference is cast iron. Insert the chunks into the smoker box and leave the lid off!
Without question, electric smokers are by far the easiest smokers to manage as they require no charcoal lighting, no constant checking of the fuel supply, and usually no messy ash pan. These are units that are designed to run on very little wood product, usually between 2-5 ounces because the actual ‘fuel’ is an electric coil. No gas, charcoal, or pellet.
You thought you timed the meat perfectly on your smoker or grill. When it came time to cut it, all you found was a gray, dry former piece of meat staring back at you.
What went wrong?
Don’t fall into your old habits when it comes to outdoor cooking, whether you’re using a traditional wood or electric smoker, charcoal grill or gas grill. Learn some easy tips to keep your foods juicy and enticing this outdoor cooking season by preventing the unwanted occurrence of dry smoked meats.
We are going beyond the obvious and the traditional when it comes to items that you can smoke. It’s time to up your skills and menu items with the top things you would never think of to smoke.
Keep in mind, we are not just referring to hot smoking. We’re including the quick technique of handheld food smoking as well as stove top smoking in a pan.
You smell it before you see it! The aroma of foods being cooked outdoors. When those foods involve cooking over wood – hardwood to be specific – well, it’s a flavor experience that is in a league of its own.
Today, instead of concentrating on the cooking technique of wood-fires, let’s examine the smoke vapor.
Does BBQ smoke color mean anything for flavor outcome?
The quick answer: absolutely! Let’s take a closer look at the finer points of smoke vapor colors.
Including the grill in staycation plans is a flavor rich must this year!
Including the Grill in Staycation Plans:
The Grill
The reports are in and all point to one common theory: people are likely to cancel previous plans to vacation away, especially those considering foreign travel, and instead opt for a staycation.
What does this mean for the economy? Of course, there will be negatives with this decision not to travel but one potential positive is the soar in potential grill sales as people begin to ponder ways to keep home cooking interesting.
Options of Including the Grill in Staycation Plans
Likely the first assessment for most considering a staycation is what do we do for food. People often have dining out plans built into their weekly schedule but due to concerns with visiting populated locations like a restaurant, food truck, or even street vendor, these locales will likely be one of the first voluntary bans. That means, cooking at home just moved to the front of the line. Cooking on the stove top or in the oven are certainly options, but given you want to keep your body from getting bored you’ll likely want to branch out to the outdoors and start grilling, especially if the weather makes that enticing.
Here’s where the lesson needs to be learned. Don’t just settle for cooking direct heat method like you do with hamburgers, hot dogs and sausages. Learn how to grill with indirect heat and you’ll be in great position to put a variety of foods including vegetables, animal proteins, and even fruits and nuts on the grill.
The starting point, however, is to assess your current outdoor cooking equipment and decide the following:
► Is the equipment in good working order to be used frequently?
► Are there any components of the grill that need replacing? For example, the grill grates, heat shields, ignitors, wheels on a portable unit, charcoal pan, water pan, etc.
► Is the current equipment of adequate size to feed your family all at once?
► Is the equipment easy to operate meaning it won’t burdened you with constant supervision?
► Does the equipment have an option for a dedicated fuel set up like LP gas conversion to natural gas which will allow you full use without having to worry about filling LP tanks?
► If you want to up the flavor of your grill foods, can you easily add wood to the unit?
If you’re in the market for a new grilling unit, assess the frequency of its use and what you want to be able to cook on it before making the purchase. The more frequent use the higher quality the materials that make up the grill need to be, to keep the grill functional for a very long time.
In the end, you not only will have piece of mind in knowing you can feed your family great tasting foods, but you’ll likely have a great opportunity to bond in a great outdoor environment.
Do you plan to take a staycation? Leave us a comment and subscribe to get our latest tips, techniques, recipes and the science behind the fire and smoke, for all live fire cooking methods. That’s SmokinLicious!
More related reading on including the grill in staycation plans and for more smoking & Grilling tips and technique see our directory on previous blogs!
WILDFIRE SMOKE TAINT grapes may add some bold tastes
WILDFIRE SMOKE TAINT IS THE BBQ COOK’S UMAMI
Summary:
The Wine Spectator article has us thinking how Wildfire Smoke taint grapes can make smoke taint in wine! Think what a smoke taint wine with a smoky taste can do for your Barbecue sauces! These vineyard grapes caught in the California wildfires by the traveling smoke can add some smoky boldness to our cooking!
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I came across a fascinating article in Wine Spectator (June 15, 2018) that made me salivate. The article focused on the wildfires of California, specifically Northern California, in October 2017 that had vineyards struggling with grapes that had not yet been harvested for wine production and were exposed to the fire’s smoke.
Smoke taint. That is the smoky flavors grapes will pick up from traveling smoke gases and particles that become airborne with the wind. Even if a vineyard did not experience the fire directly, it can be affected by the traveling smoke. That is the key though: a vineyard may or may not contain smoke taint in the grapes.
Let’s be honest. When you bought that charcoal grill you were likely thinking that you could both grill and smoke without needing to add anything. Soon, you realized, that just wasn’t the case. Now, you’re contemplating whether you need to purchase a smoker. Well, hold on the shopping trip until you read this. We can help you turn your charcoal grill into a smoker!
You can turn your charcoal grill into a smoker with these simple steps!
Is it fresh, is always a question that comes from new smokehouse products wood chips customers only! Our old customers know that at Smokinlicious® we are cutting products daily and measuring moisture to produce the best smoking wood in the world!
I always find it interesting when we receive a new inquiry about providing specialty products for commercial-grade smokehouses. I’m speaking specifically to the large commercial-grade smokehouse. The type that utilize walk-in, wall smokehouse units that can turn out hundreds of pounds of product each cycle.
First, there’s always the question if we can duplicate the current wood chip product. That’s where the education begins.
