Hot smoking is when the fire and food are in relatively close proximity. It might be very gentle heat indeed, but the smoking process will also cook your meat or fish. This technique is extremely simple to emulate at home because you need no special equipment; all you need are some wood chips and a grill pan. I might heavily hot smoke a steak with hickory chips before pan frying for a perfect char, or slowly smoke a side of salmon over beech so that it flakes apart as a perfect sharing centrepiece.
A lot of people think of smoking primarily as a way of preserving food – and it is true that bugs do not like the delicious pollutants that coat the meat – but try not to look at it this way. Smoking might slow the growth of stuff that lives on the surface, but it does nothing for the core. It might stop some mould growing on the surface, but it isn’t going to protect you against the nasties that are likely to cause serious harm. Smoking is for flavour, as far as this book is concerned.
If you’re not already an evangelical smoker, I hope that this method of adding awesome flavour to your fish and meat will change the way you cook. It is so easy, and you don’t need anything beyond what you would find in a normal kitchen. To understand why this works, we need to look at the basic principles of cooking with wood.
Wood flames can provide interesting and delicious flavours to fish or meat in three distinct ways. The first is through the direct heating of the meat itself – this creates that classic char. This happens due to the high temperatures causing reactions between the proteins and sugars naturally present on the meat. These are called Maillard reactions, after Louis Camille Maillard, the French physician and chemist who described them in the early 20th century. These give that pleasant umami flavour and contrast in texture that would not be there if the meat was simply poached. There is, however, no difference in the Maillard reactions possible over naked flames or using a hot pan. Cooking bread in a wood oven, for instance, makes no better bread than that cooked in an identical conventional oven.
The second way that hot wood can provide flavour, then, is by the burning of the fat that drips down from the meat or fish onto the high heat. This causes the fat to vaporise or to burn, imparting a pleasantly burnt or ‘barbequed’ flavour. The combination of these two processes is what makes barbequed food taste really good.
However, traditional barbeques do not impart any wood smoke flavour. If you use charcoal, all of the aromatic compounds from the wood have been incinerated already. In fact, the main reason that you burn the charcoal for so long before beginning to barbeque is to prevent licks of flames causing a thick layer of bitter, black soot on your meat. Some people might mistake this for char, and that is wrong.
The best way to induce beautiful flavour is to use wood – fresh wood, smouldering, before it has the blackness of charcoal. This is where you get the subtleties of the wood carried in the smoke. When I’m barbequing, I do indeed use charcoal and burn to white embers first, but I always have some fresh wood of some kind or another to stick on at the last minute before I add the meat – it transforms the flavour. If I’m in a rush, I might just get a roaring fire going and flash straight on a steak or something that requires high heat and minimal cooking.
Which brings us to examining the best ways of hot smoking at home. The heat involved is nowhere near the same level as when barbequing, so the numbers of Maillard reactions are limited. However, in hot smoking, we sacrifice this for massive fresh smoke flavour. The way we create this is not through direct flames, but heat from smouldering wood.
If you place wood chips or sawdust in a pan and stick them over a low heat on the hob, it will eventually begin to smoulder and smoke in a gentle way, turning the wood into charcoal and no more. This gives us exactly the kind of flavour we are looking for. If you can find a way to suspend your food above this, such as by using a mesh or grill, the heat from the gentle hob will cook your meat as the wood smoulders. Turn that heat too high, though, the wood will burn beyond a charcoal stage and you’ll find your meat coated with a bitter, acrid ash. It’s not nice on the tongue.
If you are making the wood chips or sawdust yourself, make sure they’re from untreated wood. Most woods impart some kind of pleasant flavour, especially that from fruit trees (apple, cherry), as well as oak, beech, maple, ash and walnut. Each has its own set of characteristics, and I encourage you to experiment. If you can get hold of some fresh peat, it’s awesome. Soaking everything in whisky or rum beforehand is to be encouraged.
Nota bene
This is an indoor technique. I am obliged to say that you should not leave your smoking wood unsupervised, you should ensure you have good extraction (open a window) and you should have a pail of water to hand to put out any fires you won’t cause.
Preparing your food
Marinate, cure or simply season your meat or fish of choice. If I’m trying out a new smoke combination I’ve never used before, I tend to coat both sides of my raw piece of fish or meat in a thin sprinkling of table salt and a sprinkling of sugar, and leave it to sit on the worktop, uncovered for 15 or 20 minutes. After this time, the flesh will be well seasoned and mildly cured; you’ll notice a film of water that can be patted dry with kitchen paper before smoking.