Cold Smoking
Grilled on May 17th, 2007 in SmokologyWhen most people talking about smoking, they’re usually talking about hot smoking where, over the course of a few hours, meat is infused with that nice smoky flavor and it’s cooked at the same time. Cold smoking is a little different, it’s when the food being smoked is held separately from the heat and gets infused with that smoky flavor without every rising above room temperature. When you talk about smoked salmon or any smoked cheeses, you’re talking about this type of smoking.
There are risks to smoking things this way because of how long the product sits at room temperature, many more hours than with hot smoking, and so this is often used with some sort of curing in order to kill any bacterial or microbes living in the food.
Okay, now that we’ve gone over what cold smoking is, can someone tell me why you would use it? I can’t seem to find any reasons you would use it over hot smoking. The only reason I can think of is if you were going to salt cure the product and wanted some smoky flavoring, then you’d cold smoke it after curing. So if anyone knows, please enlighten me!
Cold-smoking produces a completely different flavour and texture to hot-smoking. For example, hot-smoked salmon resembles a cooked piece of salmon texture-wise, though tasting of smoke.
‘Proper’ (cold-smoked) smoked salmon has a much more delicate texture (it is uncooked) and a more complex flavour. I think that the quality of salmon you get in the US isn’t as good as the stuff from the UK (esp Scotland) though saying that there is a lot of rubbish smoked salmon about here as well. Perhaps if you ordered some wild, Scottish smoked salmon off the internet you could compare it with the American, perhaps have it with brown bread and butter/blinis, it really is a serious gourmet food.
Excellent point Jeff, I do enjoy me some smoked salmon and I guess I never really connected how the smoking process worked though the salmon didn’t taste terribly salty… at least as much as you’d guess it would need to be if fish sat at room temperature for hours and hours. Do you know how they get it not to go back? Or does the smoke cure it enough to handle it?
cold smoking is great for things like…….Bacon. That is what I use it for.