How to Smoke BBQ Meat for Beginners

Smoking meat is a really fantastic way of bringing out the full flavor and texture of the cut; it adds a whole new dimension to recipes that we are all familiar with. Many people tend to view smoked meat as something of a luxury, a specialist product that can’t be produced by the average barbeque operator, but if you have a look at these electric smokers, you could be cooking up delicious smoked meat on a daily basis! The good news is that smoking meat is actually incredibly easy and something that anyone can do in order to really bring out the full range of flavors for their next barbeque.

The Prep

The first thing you need to do is to prepare the meat you will be using for smoking. The first thing you need to ensure is that you are starting with good quality meat, smoking won’t be able to help cheap meat of an inferior quality. Once you have selected a good quality cut of meat, the next thing that you need to sort out is your stockpile of wood.

The type of wood you use can have an impact on how the final smoked meat tastes and so you should aim wherever possible to use wood that is either hickory, apple, cherry, or oak. Some woods, such as mesquite have a very strong and distinctive flavor which can easily ruin otherwise very good meat.

The Smoke

It is important that you don’t generate too much heat when smoking your meat as this will spoil the flavor. The optimal temperature for smoking meat depends on the meat, you want a temperature which has sufficient heat to ignite the wood and generates sufficient smoke to transfer flavor to the meat, while remaining cool enough to avoid causing the meat to overcook.

The important thing to remember about smoking meat is that it needs to be a slow process in order to be effective. Not exposing meat to smoke long enough will mean that there is very little transfer of flavor and you will go to an extraordinary amount of extra effort for no reason.

Once the meat has been exposed to the smoke for a couple of hours, it is then ready to be cooked. You should cook the meat as you normally would as soon as you can after smoking it in order to obtain optimum results.

Using a good smoker will make a lot of difference too, check out electricsmokecenter.com for reviews of different electric smokers.

The Advantages

There are a number of reasons why chefs choose to smoke their meat. For one thing, the use of smoked meat gives you a broader range of flavors to play with, which means that you can incorporate smoked meat into a much wider range of dishes. Smoking meat also allows more varied dishes to be made from the same ingredients and so rather than having to go out and buy several different kinds of meat, a chef can make use of the different flavors offered by smoking.

Smoking meats gives chefs a greater control over their flavor and texture while allowing them to expand their palette in an easy to control manner.