I bought a smoker a while back and have been firing it up recently.
The stuff I’ve been smoking (various pork products) comes out tasty enough <but> not the same as (I hesitate to admit it, but probably not quite as good as) high-end commercial stuff. The main thing I’ve noticed is that regardless of the wood I use (hickory, alder, apple) the “smoky” taste is more . . . acrid and harsh than what I get when I buy bacon or whatever at the store. For any of you who have been around brush fires or the like, the meat ends up tasting a bit like that kind of smoke/soot and a lot less like my store’s bacon.
Any amateur smokers have tips on how to get a lighter/sweeter, but still smoked-through, taste?
Yes. You are discovering the difference between good smoking and bad smoking. When you don’t have a clean fire with plenty of ventilation, you get the acrid tasting, sooty smoke formed by creosote deposits.
Here’s what to do:
Adequate ventilation. You don’t want to suffocate your meat with smoke. All that does is coat your meat in creosote. You need proper airflow and a clean fire that is NOT billowing white smoke. I never ever have the flue or top vent on my smoker closed. Which brings us to:
Build a clean fire. Billowing white smoke = BAD. It may look nice and like you’re smoking, but what you want is wispy, bluish white smoke. Depending on what kind of smoker you’re using, you may not need that much wood at all. For a vertical Weber Smokey Mountain smoker, I use 4-6 fist sized chunks of wood with the rest lump wood charcoal during a smoking session. For something with a lot more airflow (like a cinderblock pit), I use whole logs. You do not want to use straight wood for something like a vertical smoker, which does not have enough airflow to support all that smoke. It’ll just end up oversmoking the meat.
Use wood chunks or split logs. Do not use wood chips, soaked or not. Soaked wood chips just smolder and unsoaked wood chips just disintegrate in a few minutes. And don’t bother soaking your chunks. It does nothing good for your clean smoke, and, besides, the water doesn’t soak into the wood, unless you possibly soak it for many months. Wet wood is not good for smoking. I have no idea where this comes from. It might be okay in a quick grilling application where you just want to generate some quick smoke, but the flavor of burning wet wood is vile, like Liquid Smoke. (Liquid Smoke to me tastes of that acrid, sootiness you describe.)
Type of wood: hickory is pretty strong, but you can smoke on straight hickory with a mix of charcoal lump. However, if I’m burning an all-wood fire in a pit, then I use a mix of hickory and white oak and/or possibly apple wood. Oak and apple are fairly mild and neutral. Hickory has a sharper flavor to it, which I like. Maple is also very good as a milder base wood to mix in with the oak.
What kind of smoker are you using? How are you building your fire?
All right – what smoker do you have? I don’t smoke myself, but I think if you want more smoke flavor, maybe a cooler temperature would be more apropos. You can’t cold smoke, though, unless you have a specially-designed thing for that – so, hot smoke, and don’t skimp on the aromatic wood – you need a lot of that wood to get into the flesh.
ETA I’m so dumb I didn’t preview – look at the earlier posts.
ETA: In that, is there any? I don’t see any flue. That’s the first thing I would do to it: try to fashion a flue for their to be airflow. I had the same problem with my original Brinkman vertical water smoker. The damned thing created awfully bitter smoky meat. I mean, most people didn’t seem to notice it or care, but I did. Then I got a WSM, read a little more about smoking, and did exactly the same thing in the WSM as with the Brinkman with one difference: the WSM actually has a vent on top, whereas the Brinkman just keeps all the smoke inside (unless you modify it.) That made all the difference.
Now, I can actually deal with the Brinkman, with the ventilation modification, but, out of the box, it makes sooty barbecue.
I would say, not great. I think that may be intentional as on the smaller ones, with just an electric element and the burning wood to provide heat, they are concerned with keeping the temperature up, so there’s only a few small vents (you can see them in the snapshot on the webpage, on the top and sides of the unit). Indeed, the heat is iffy enough that things on the top shelf either need to be left there a long, long time (compared to the shelf right above the heater), or cycled down to a lower shelf.
Oh, I think I could make them out now. You don’t need tons of ventilation–I think about four quarter sized holes should be enough. But if you are creating a lot of thick white smoke (which I’m afraid the chips are doing), you’re going to encounter some of that sootiness eventually.
I’m confused by what you are doing with the smoker. Is it electric?
Bacon is cured and “cold” smoked. That is a whole 'nother thing from smoking ribs or pork butts. If you are trying to reproduce bacon like from a store, then you cure the bacon, smoke it very slowly with no heat, then slice and fry. If you want to cook store bought bacon in a smoker it is going to come out smoker because it was smoked twice.
It is electric and I was trying (among other things) to smoke cured pork bellies and make bacon.
Based on some of the comments here, what I may do is partly/mostly oven cook the cured belly, then place it on the top shelf in this smoker, where it’s not very hot, over small quantities of smoke over a long, long time. It doesn’t overcome all the limitations of the equipment I’ve got, but maybe a few of them.
Shiftless covered this but you must have missed it.
There are 2 types of smoking methods: hot smoke which cooks the food and cold smoke which doesn’t. Some things can be both hot and cold smoked. For example salmon or ham depending if you want to cook it while it smokes. However 2 things are NEVER HOT SMOKED - lox and BACON. Always cold smoke it. If you hot smoke bacon, you are basically cooking a pork brisket which
a) I have never heard of being done
b) Is a long process. Beef brisket is a good 10-12 hours.
Incidently, I made my hot smoker out of an old oven. I tore out the insulation and I use the underneath broiler for the charcoal/wood chunks. The bottom of the over is layered with lava rock as a heatsink and because it’s an oven, the racks are already there and it’s easy to access.
I’d suspect that whole smoker could be very sensitive. Wood chips probably aren’t the best source of smoke. There could be a lot of bark or who knows what in the chips. The electric heater may be getting too hot, or not hot enough, and giving you acrid smoke. Also based on the picture, I assume the smoke is going straight up into the food, so that includes the hottest stuff that would pass over the food in some other smoker configurations. Just having the smoke source that close to the food could be a problem. I’m not sure how you can cold smoke in that tower, it would probably get too hot. In warm weather I have to keep the smoke chamber seperate from my barrel smoker and use aluminum ducts to carry the smoke over so it gets cool enough to smoke salmon.
pulykamell’s suggestion to add ventilation sounds like a good idea. You could also try soaking the chips to cool down the smoke (slow the burn actually). It works well with some wood in bigger pieces, I don’t know about chips though.
Just to add to, and restate, what Saint Cad says. When bacon is smoked it isn’t being cooked. We cook it when we slice it and put it in the frying pan. So the process for smoking bacon is just to preserve and slightly flavor it, not to cook.
I have cooked store bought (sliced) bacon in my smoker (a Brinkman) when it was wrapped around something else, like peppers. That bacon had been cured and smoked at the bacon factory. I was just adding more smoke flavor, crisping the bacon and rendering the fat, which then moistened the stuffed peppers.
You can use the oven, but you should smoke first then finish in the oven. Cold product takes smoke much better, (like sub 140 internal temp). Adding smoke to product that is much more above that temp can lead to the unpleasant taste mentioned above also.
You can cold smoke in any smoker, but it will take some tinkering with temp control, and water pans and such.
Dont get discouraged. once you learn the ins and outs of your unit and experiment a little, you will be a regular pit master.
Here’s a tutorial. Basically, I only did the drilling holes on top of it part. I don’t use the Brinkman except when I need the extra cooker. It’s finicky and requires more attention than the WSM to keep the temps relatively constant and up (I’m not a stickler about temp–as long as it’s in the general 225-275ish range, that’s fine with me.)
And you certainly CAN hot smoke pork belly to get bacon. I have no idea why people are insisting it can’t be done or that it isn’t done. It is. It’s not the traditional type of cold-smoked bacon, but it turns out a fine product, indeed. For those interested in doing it, it takes maybe 1.5-2 hours to cook at 250. Pull it when the internal temp is 150.