Home made smoked seasonings & rubs
Most people are aware of smoked salmon, smoked sausage, even smoked cheeses. But things definitely get a bit more interesting when you start making smoked salts and seasonings at home. Particularly when they're smoked to your exact preferences, with your own home-grown recipes (perhaps even home-grown herbs and spices) to boot.
Smoking doesn't start at the barbecue!
If you're making seasonings, you need your ingredients to be dry. Here we've harvested some of our onions, diced it up, then run those pieces through our food dehydrator for most of a week to make them crispy. Sometimes we'll even use the oven afterwards on low heat (higher than a dehydrator) just to get that crispiness we're looking for.
Blend your onion flakes to your desired coarseness.
Here we've just barely pulsed our chunks into smaller pieces. We're not looking for powder here, but chunks that will happily go into (and through) a pepper grinder without falling through at inopportune times. This batch is intended for one of my smoked seasoning mixes. The dehydration levels on the onion must be near-complete... you don't want mushed onion in your grinder's business end. It'll just gum up the works. Crisp snaps, or decent crunch when chewed is my metric.
Here's where the magic happens...
There are many ways to smoke food. This Kamado style barbecue is natively able to smoke meats using traditional hot smoking techniques.
However, while that works for meats, the foods that are more sensitive to heat (such as cheeses, fermented sausages, and dried herbs in this case) need smoke without the heat. To do that, you need the fire in one location, and then to pipe the smoke into a cavity with the food. If you have a small fire, a mere foot is more than enough to stop anything but the most gentle heat reaching the food, and that's fine for foods that don't need refrigeration.
See the "exhaust pipe" on the front here. That's filled with wood chips, and if you notice a tiny hole in the bottom with orange coals in the bottom, that's the tiny fire making all that smoke. If you pay a lot of attention, you'll see a small white pipe in the bottom left corner. That's attached to an air pump, and that helps the fire breathe, draws the smoke into the barbecue, and cools the smoke-filled air at the same time. Then the smoke fills the barbecue, and the excess comes out the top. As seen here.
If you're wondering what that attachment is called....
The official name is the "UFO cold smoke generator". (UFO is the brand). I've tried a few different options over the years, but this one has not only worked well, it's lasted years smoking in all weathers and seasons.
Honestly, it does blow out occasionally if you have the wrong sized wood chips. Wood dust (or sawdust) is too fine, and it smothers the fire. Chunks have gaps too big that don't always set fire to the next piece of wood as it burns.. and it can also jam in the tube leaving unburned wood wedged in the feed tube. Chips is what you need.
The other issue is that it needs a really long wire bottle brush to clean out properly, but it works well on almost any kind of barbecue, smoke house, even a box of some kind... I've even seen pictures of them attached through drilled holes in fridges.(I think the fridge is dead, and they're using the chasis).
If you're interested in this attachment, you can find the link to the manufacturer here:
If you don't think a small fire can't make a lot of smoke...
Think again! I want to call this, "the eye-watering moment". Yet it smells amazing! I think this was smoked with apple wood chips... and had been smoking for about 14 hours at this point.
I use these plastic sieves to contain my rock salt, seeds, and spices, all while allowing the smoke to pass through the gaps as well as surround the various food items here. You can even see the smoke tinge on the (normally white) plastic bits.
That sieve on the right has coriander seeds in it. I almost certainly had salt, pepper, onion and paprika in the other ones.. but good luck seeing that through the smoke.
Smoking wood choice, and total time smoked makes a difference!
Ok, this isn't the best photo, but you can see how pure fruit woods impart a brownish tinge in the left container. The addition of an oak type of wood chip which normally pairs well with red meats, adds a noticably darker hue, with marginally longer smoking times. However, if you add lots more time, and an oak.. you get a salt that could easily be mistaken for cracked pepper, since it's so black.
I don't cook with these salts, I finish with these salts. So if you'd like a subtle smokey smell, that's when you'd add these to your meals.
Salt smoked with fruit woods...
Just in case you couldn't see the brown tinge that smoking with fruit woods can do (without smoking for days on end) here's a much closer shot. This particular batch was smoked with peach and apple, and while it fundamentally smells of smoke, it's a slightly sweet smoke. However, not everyone can tell that though. It's less smokey than the darker stuff that's smoked for upwards of a day, sometimes two.
Mixing smoked ingredients together
Here I've mixed salt, coriander seeds, and dried onion chunks. All of which have been cold smoked with peach and apple wood for 16 hours.
If you like onion salt, the coriander seeds add a citrus and slightly peppery tinge to the flavour profile (which works everywhere lemon flavours would) and the lighter smoke adds a pleasant aroma to the mix.. which of course, impacts flavour. This is one of my go-to mixes for white meats, fish, prawns, and potato dishes.
Presentation matters!
Once the smoked ingredients are smoked, mixed (if needed) and tested (it's a sacrifice, but I do it willingly, hehe) I put it into jars ready for sale. Here I have a smoked salt and pepper mix (Smokey Dalmation) and a lightly smoked salt done with Peach and Apple wood. (Sorry about the dark photo, it's not that dark in real life).
So, I made a few jars of smoked seasonings...
Back by surprisingly large demand. You see, I got a phone call from the Craft Shop telling me that a lot of people had enjoyed my smoked seasonings during the previous Christmas, and wanted to order more. That call came in around September, and I spent the next six weeks smoking various goods 24 hours a day, (around work and other commitments) to varying degrees. There was a whole range of products and each came in at least three different levels of smokiness. This is just part of the first box, and there were three large boxes.
Of course, I don't just sell them....
Obviously, if you're getting serious in professional food production, you need to comply with all the relevant legal requirements. Since we do use nuts in our kitchen, I have to warn people that like myself, my products may contain traces of nuts. Even if it's extremely unlikely.
That said, if you have a batch of home-smoked ingredients, that pitifully smoked paprika that you get in the shops will seem like comparing tepid tea to a well-aged single malt, served to perfection. (I worked in a bar, and there is a big difference between differing serving styles that hinder aroma and dull the taste buds... that's sad for a luxury-experience Scotch, painstakingly aged over decades).
It's handy to have some of these jars around. You can give them as gifts, bribery for help/labour, you can sneak a bit into your aunt's no-sodium meals, and pretend that dark grey salt is pepper. (My aunt hasn't met diet fad she didn't try, regardless of how tasteless the meals become. Sssh... I didn't tell you that, but it's ok... she's a technophobe who hates the Internet. She doesn't even know I have a web site, and wouldn't visit if she did).
Remember, these are finishing salts, so the smoke is removed in most cooking processes. That said, if you dry rub this salt on steak, a little of that smoke is preserved when the salt is absorbed prior to cooking.
Anyway, cold smoking allows me to impart smokiness to both seasonings, and dried herbs/spices without damaging them or losing too much of their original flavour. That's something I can't do with the hot smoking methods I'd normally use when barbecuing.