Smokers' paradise

In our third afternoon workshop on smoking, the Secret Garden Club used three different food smoking techniques to demonstrate a wide variety of foods which can benefit from this time-honoured method of preparing and flavouring food.

We started with tea-smoking, a method using the smoke from heated tea leaves to infuse food with a delicate flavour. Then we moved outdoors, on an unseasonably bright winter's day, to hot-smoke vegetables, tofu and halloumi cheese. Finally we turned our intention to our tried and tested home-built cold smoker, made without any specialist equipment, and with no engineering or woodworking skills required.

Further details on smoking generally and the set-ups required for the three different techniques can be found on this blog here (lots of detail on creating a cold smoker) and here (which includes info on different heat sources for cold smoking). Below I've summarised the techniques and give recipes for the food we smoked on the day.

Tea-smoked food
This is a good way to smoke foods quickly and can be done on a conventional hob, although it’s difficult to do without setting off your smoke alarm. I would advise opening all windows and doors before you start.

Tea-smoking mixture comprises loose leaf tea, raw long grain rice and brown sugar. American measuring cups are a boon here, as you need equal quantities of each by volume, thus to smoke food in a 20cm pan, you'll need:

½ cup tea leaves (or 30g if you don't have cups). Use plain black tea, or Lapsang Souchong. Some people like Earl Grey in smoking mixtures, which I find a bit too floral.

½ cup raw long grain rice (or 75g)

½ cup Demerara sugar (or 75g)

Tea-smoked trout fillets

3 trout fillets, preferably from organic or wild fish
1 quantity of tea-smoking mixture as above

A 20cm pan with a steamer basket and a tight-fitting lid.

Cut a square of foil slightly larger than the diameter of your pan and line the bottom of the pan to form a kind of pouch or foil dish within it. Mix the sugar, rice and tea leaves together well and pour into the foil pouch, taking care not to spill over on to the pan surface itself.

Fit the steamer basket and set the pan on a high heat. You should start to see wisps of smoke within 10 minutes. Lay the trout fillets in the steamer basket, trying to keep them to a single layer as much as possible. Put the lid on the steamer basket, and turn the heat down slightly, so that you get a steady stream of smoke feeding into the basket holding the fillets.

Depending on the thickness of the fillets and how well done you like your fish, they will be cooked and ready in 10-20 minutes. Lift the lid cautiously after about seven minutes to see how they're getting on and check regularly after that.


Hot-smoked food
Hot-smoking is usually done by heating up wood chips until they give off smoke, which comes into direct contact with the food. Because the environment is hot, the food cooks as well as being smoked.

Note, when smoking with any kind of wood, it is vitally important that the wood is raw, and untreated. Any sort of treatment, coating, glue or varnish will give off potentially toxic fumes when smoked - NOT what you want coating your food. If the wood you want to use has been cut with a chainsaw, beware - there could easily be oil residues on the wood from the chainsaw. It's highly satisfying to use wood that you have chopped or sourced yourself, but you must be 100% certain that the wood is free of any chemicals. 

Smoked marinaded tofu
Marinade:

3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp maple syrup

3 tbsp olive oil
1 teasp sesame oil
2 teasp Dijon mustard

(this is based on the tofu marinade used at the last smoking workshop in March 2012, but I've amended the recipe slightly to give a fuller, more robust flavour.)

1 carton firm tofu, sliced around 4-5mm thick

In the morning, mix all the marinade ingredients together in a shallow dish. Slide the tofu slices in, cover and marinade in the fridge for 4 hours or more.

When the hot smoker is ready, lift the tofu pieces on to a piece of foil on the rack and hot-smoke for 30 minutes. Some guests felt the smoky flavour of the tofu was quite strong - you can experiment by smoking for 15 minutes, say, and then checking whether the flavour is right for you.

Smoked halloumi

Halloumi is a Cypriot cheese with a firm texture and mild flavour. It has such a high melting point that it can be fried, grilled - or hot-smoked.
If you cut a block of halloumi into slices 5-10mm thick, and hot-smoke these for 25-30 minutes, they make a delicious addition to a red pepper or tomato salad.

Cold-smoked food

Smoked semi-dried tomatoes

Before going on to the cold smoker, the tomatoes were slow-roasted in the oven at 130 degrees for three hours. I would love to call them smoked sun-dried tomatoes, but sun is in rather short supply at the moment, so semi-dried in the oven it has to be.

MsMarmiteLover explains more about smoking tomatoes in her post here.



Smoked camembert

Take one whole camembert, not overripe. Place on a square of foil on the smoking rack and cold-smoke for about 6 hours.

To let the flavours develop through the cheese, remove from the smoker and wrap in foil or cling film. Place in the fridge for 3-4 days before returning to room temperature and letting the cheese ripen fully.

Smoked quail's eggs

Put the quail's eggs in a pan, cover with cold water and bring steadily to the boil over a medium heat. Boil gently for 4 minutes - they will be cooked all the way through. Plunge the eggs into cold water to stop the cooking process, then store in the fridge until you're ready to smoke them.

Once the cold smoker is set up, peel them and lay on a strip of foil on the smoking rack. Smoke for 4-6 hours - the surface of the eggs should be just beginning to brown, like a light tan. Remove and serve with salt for dipping the eggs into - we also smoked the salt (spread thinly on a plate and cold-smoked for 2 hours) at the Secret Garden Club.

Smoked salmon

Salmon is usually split into two sides with the backbone removed, or cut into fillets before it is smoked. Unless you're an experienced filleter, it's probably to buy the salmon ready-cut or get the fishmonger to do it. Before it can be cold-smoked, salmon also needs to be cured, ie, steeped in sugar and salt for 18-24 hours before you put it on the smoker. This curing process helps to preserve the salmon, inhibiting the possible multiplication of bacteria that may otherwise take place during the smoking process.

Curing usually means covering both sides of your fillets with a mix of equal parts of sugar and salt, plus flavourings such as herbs - dill is a classic ingredient in salmon cure. Cover the bottom of a baking tray with half the salt/sugar mix, strew with the herbs and lay the fillets, skin side down over the mixture. Now spread the rest of the salt/sugar over the exposed salmon flesh until it's all covered. Wrap the salmon and tray tightly with cling film and place on a shelf in your fridge. You also need to weigh down the salmon - I placed full milk and juice cartons on top of the salmon while it was curing.

Slender fillets will probably need only 18 hours in the cure mixture. For a thicker side of salmon keep the salmon curing the fridge for 24 hours or more. After 24 hours you can also scrape away the used salt/sugar and replace with another batch.

At the end of the curing process you'll find the baking tray full of liquid. Pour this off carefully, then rinse and dry the salmon. You should find the fillets are less pink, more golden in colour and feel firmer or stiffer to the touch.

Finally leave the salmon fillets to dry out slightly before putting them on the cold smoker. We smoked our salmon in a mix of oak and beech wood chippings for a total of 12 hours.

The big smoke

This Sunday will be our third smoking workshop at the Secret Garden Club - it's always a popular topic, perhaps because it is so satisfying to create your own smoked food from scratch. It's also surprisingly easy, as we demonstrate, to set up your own smoker in the garden or on a patio.

One of the things that is most enjoyable about our Learn To Smoke sessions is experimenting with new flavours. We have our traditional favourites - on Sunday we'll be tea-smoking trout fillets and the side of salmon is already in the cold smoker - but it's always fun to try out some more unusual flavours.

This time, we're trying out smoked quail's eggs, using a method recommended to me, and also smoked semi-dried tomatoes - I'd love to call them sun-dried, but that would be fairly incredible at this time of year.

There'll be plenty more smoked foods to taste and talk about on Sunday and we still have a few places left at £60 which includes the workshop, demonstration and supper - book your ticket here if you'd like to come and join us.

Smoked out

The Secret Garden Club held its second smoking workshop on Sunday March 18: the notes that follow reflect the activities of the day and vary slightly from the blog post following the first smoking day in November 2011.


Smoking is a technique which imparts a distinctive flavour to food and can also change its texture slightly. Our ancestors smoked food for its preservative effect, and while food which has been smoked will take longer to go off, these days, it is for the smoke flavour plus any aromatics that may have been added to the smoke mix, that makes the food so delicious.


We looked at three different methods of smoking food during the afternoon. Tea-smoking uses a mix of sugar, rice and tea leaves which are heated until they smoulder to produce a fragrant smoke which both cooks and flavours food.


Hot-smoking over wood applies heat to wood chips in order to cook food and to flavour it more strongly. Cold smoking involves exposing food to cool smoke for a much longer period of time, from several hours to a couple of days and will both flavour and preserve food without cooking it.


Tea-smoking uses a mix of tea leaves, brown sugar, raw rice and optional aromatics as the smoking medium. With the mix set in a pan under a steamer, the smoke generated infuses foods in the steamer basket with a delicate, elusive tea-smoke flavour.

Secret Garden Club tea-smoking mix:
Half a (US) cup of tea leaves (about 4 tbsp)
Half a (US) cup of brown sugar (about 4 tbsp)
Half a (US) cup of raw long-grain rice (about tbsp)


Mix the ingredients together, then make a foil saucer that fits into the bottom of the base pan. Pour the smoking mixture on to the foil (this is to protect the pan itself from staining), set it over the heat and fit the steamer basket and lid.


The trout fillets were laid on the steamer basket just as the smoke began to curl upwards through the slats, and steamed for around 20 minutes. Times will vary and our fillets were quite chunky. With fish, remove from the smoker as soon as they are opaque all the way through so that they don't overcook. With tea-smoking, less is definitely more: over-smoke the food and you'll be left with a distinct aftertaste of fag packet.

Hot-smoking over wood applies direct heat to soaked woodchips so that they smoulder gently. The wood and the food are both in a sealed unit so that the heat and smoke permeate the food to cook and smoke it at the same time. You can use the same equipment as for tea-smoking, above, ideally on an outdoor cooker. The process will produce much more smoke than with tea-smoking, so if you do have to hot smoke over wood indoors, open all windows and doors first and turn up your extractor fan - although you will probably set off your smoke alarm even so.   

Important: when smoking food with any kind of wood, it is vitally important that the wood is raw, and untreated. Any sort of treatment, coating, glue or varnish will give off potentially toxic fumes when smoked - NOT what you want coating your food. If the wood you want to use has been cut with a chainsaw, beware - there could easily be oil residues on the wood from the chainsaw. It's highly satisfying to use wood that you have chopped or sourced yourself, but you must be 100% certain that the wood is free of any chemicals. 

We used a proprietary hot-smoker - very similar to this one - set up outside on the terrace. 

• Sweet peppers, sliced in half and with seeds removed;
• Lemons, cut in half;
• Tofu, cut into thick slices and marinaded for two hours beforehand in soy sauce and maple syrup;
• Sweetcorn, on the cob;
• Halloumi cheese

These were all smoked over hickory chips for 25-30 minutes. It's well worth experimenting with different types of wood, so long as you stick to hardwoods. We were asked on Sunday about smoking with pine to get that distinctive resinated flavour. But pine, and also cedar, contain too much in the way of tars and resins to smoke successfully and can even ruin your smoker. Fruit woods, such as pear, apple, or cherry, are all popularly used for smoking. Oak, beech and hickory are also classic smoking woods.

Marinade for tofu

3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp maple syrup
2 tsps olive oil
Half a teasp of English mustard 

Whisk all ingredients well together. This was also used to glaze the sweetcorn immediately prior to smoking.

Cold-smoking is the technique we associate most with fish (smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, smoked haddock) and meat (smoked bacon). However, it's also used to smoke cheese (such as applewood-smoked cheddar) and bulbs of garlic. When you expose food to cold, or cool, smoke, the food does not cook, although the smoke will penetrate the food more thoroughly than when hot-smoked. 

Fish (and meat) will need to be salted, or brined, before it is cold-smoked. To salt, say, a side of salmon, find a baking tray on which the salmon will fit  comfortably. Spread a layer of rock salt on the base of the tray.  Lay the salmon, skin side down on the rock salt, and cover completely with more salt. Other aromatics can be added as well: lemon slices, herbs, beetroot, some gin or vidka maybe. Now place a second baking tray on top of the salmon and salt, and weight it down by placing tins or full jars on the top. Slide the whole lot into the fridge and leave for 12-24 hours. 

Remove the salmon, reserving the salt mixture and drain away any liquid generated during this first salting. Turn the fish over on the rock salt base, so that it's now skin side up. Cover again with salt and aromatics (you may need more). Weight down again as before. Put the tray and salmon combo back in the fridge for another 12-24 hours.

Brining it creates a sweeter cure: make up a salt/sugar solution in cold water, completely immerse the fish in this and store, covered, in the fridge for around 8-12 hours. (Smaller fillets may take less time.)

Simple brine

100g brown sugar

75g salt

1 litre water

Plenty of other flavours can be added to this, eg, fennel, onions, garlic, herbs. Or go Asian with star anise, cinnamon, lemongrass or lime.

Once salted/brined, rinse the fish well to get rid of excess salt, then dry it, ideally for a couple of hours or so, in a cool, well-ventilated place. Only then it is ready to smoke. We also smoked Camembert cheese, salt, aubergines and garlic bulbs – these do not need brining or curing but can go straight into the cold smoker.

With cold-smoking, the challenge is to generate smoke that is cool when it reaches your food. The ideal temperature range in the smoker is between 26 and 30 degrees Celsius (80-90 degrees Fahrenheit). If the temperature exceeds 37 degrees C (100 F), then the fish will get too warm. It will lose moisture and may start to cook.

An obvious way to do this is to burn your wood in one place, channel the smoke through piping so that it cools as it goes, and direct it into a smokehouse. But if you just want to try out some cold-smoking, this is quite a cumbersome operation. Remember also, your fire needs to burn wood only (see warnings about wood-burning, above), and your piping and smokehouse should be lined with non-reactive material.

A second solution is to generate the smoke from as small a heat source as possible. We used a ProQ smoke generator, available online from Mac's BBQ, and Amazon among other places, placed in the bottom of an ordinary kettle barbecue. If you don't have a deep barbecue, you could try making a smokehouse out of an old fridge, or a discarded filing cabinet (popular because the file rods are handy to hang fish fillets from), or even a cardboard box (while the smoke should be cool when it reaches the box, place the smoke generator itself on foil or something non-reactive and fireproof).

The ProQ is filled with smoke dust in a spiral pattern. The outer ring of the spiral is heated by a  small tealight which can then be removed when the wood dust starts to smoulder. It will continue to smoulder for up to ten hours. It's an effective, tidy way to generate cool smoke, although we found that it didn't always produce very much smoke. Two ProQ smoke generators would probably be ideal, but expensive.


If you don't want to shell out for commercial kit straightaway, try the tin + soldering iron method instead. For this you need a deep container, again such as a kettle barbecue, a soldering iron, an empty 400g food tin, and your woodchips. For this method you'll also need access to a power supply.

Important: the soldering iron must have no solder on it AT ALL. You do not want smouldering lead contaminating your woodsmoke. Ideally, buy a new soldering iron for about a tenner and use it exclusively for cold-smoking.

Also note: many food tins these days, especially supermarket own-brand cans, are lined with a plastic coating. You should use an unlined tin - Baxter's soup cans are unlined, for example.

Before you empty the contents of the tin, make a hole in it at the top end (we used a sharpening steel and a hammer), opposite the ring-pull if there is one. The hole needs to be just big enough to fit the tip and arm of the soldering iron. This is much easier to do when the tin is full; the lid tends to buckle and collapse if you empty the contents first. Wash out the tin, and let it dry.

Using the ring-pull, carefully peel back the lid of the tin about half way. Fill just over half the tin with your wood chips. Close the lid as far as possible, then push the soldering iron through the hole so that it’s fully inserted in the tin and the arm is in direct contact with the woodchips. 

Put the tin with the soldering iron inserted in the bottom of the barbecue. Lay the food to be smoked on silver foil on the top rack. Carefull trail the soldering iron's cable out of the barbecue and plug into the power supply. Place the lid on the barbecue as tightly as possible allowing for the fact that the soldering iron cable will prevent it from closing fully. Switch on the power to the extension cable. You should start to see wisps of smoke emerge from under the lid within 5 mins.

With the soldering iron and tin at the bottom of the barbecue and the food laid out at the top, the smoke around the food should stay cool enough to cold smoke properly. If you have an outdoor thermometer, it's a good idea to place it on the rack next to the food, so that you can check the temperature regularly. On a sunny day, the outside temperature may heat up the interior of the barbecue. If you do see the temperature rising much above 30 degrees, slide a bag of ice into the bottom of the barbecue next to the tin of woodchips. This should bring the temperature down to the safe range and keep it there.

While the woodchip tin is smoking, prepare a second one. The tins will last about 90 mins to 2 hours, so, when the first is exhausted, unplug the soldering iron, remove it and the tin from the barbecue, and switch the soldering iron from tin 1 to tin 2. Tin 1 can now be emptied and reused.

Smoking workshop March 2012

Menu

Rum punch with smoked lemons

Smoked trout salad

Halloumi salad with tomatoes

Smoked marinaded tofu

Smoked red peppers

Smoked sweetcorn

Smoked aubergine curry

Selection of smoked cheeses