Smoke absorbed by meat only up to 140 degrees


 
D

dave_scarpetti

TVWBB Member
Excuse the odd title all, but I've read in many places on the web that meat only obtains smoke flavor during smoking up to, but not after, 140 degrees F.

Does anyone have an authoritative source for this?

I heard some buck the conventional wisdom of warming meat to room temperature and smoking meat from the fridge just to get a longer duration of smoke exposure.

Thanks,
Dave
 
Smoke Rings

The smoke ring stops forming at 140. The longer below this temperature in smoke produces a larger smoke ring.

At 140 the smoke ring stops but the absorption of smoke flavor does not stop.
 
Originally posted by dave_scarpetti:
Excuse the odd title all, but I've read in many places on the web that meat only obtains smoke flavor during smoking up to, but not after, 140 degrees F.

Does anyone have an authoritative source for this?

I heard some buck the conventional wisdom of warming meat to room temperature and smoking meat from the fridge just to get a longer duration of smoke exposure.

Thanks,
Dave
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Well, I'm certainly no authority on the matter but we're talking about 2 different things here..

Meat will absorb smoke (at or near the surface of the meat only) the whole time it's subjected to it.

The smoke ring, on the other hand, will stop forming when the meat reached approx. 140º. That's why some people like to put meat on straight out of the fridge instead of warming to room temperature .. You have that extra 40º for smoke ring formation.

HTH

Bill

Sorry Russell .. Typing at the same time
 
Hey Dave-

Don't take the internet's word for it, try it for yourself!
icon_smile.gif


Put two fresh pork butts in a pan in the oven with little or no seasoning, and cook at 250* a couple hours until the internal temp of the butts hits 140*. Meanwhile, get your smoker chugging away with a couple nice chunks of hickory, pecan, or whatever you like. Now move one of the pork butts out to the smoker, leave the other one in the oven, and cook several more hours until both are ready to be pulled.

I guarantee the one you finish for several hours on the smoker will have a smokey flavor, even though it wasn't exposed to smoke until AFTER it hit 140*.
 
Russell, thanks for that reference. Looks like what I was looking for.

Bill, thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize it was 2 different things I was trying to get at, but makes sense.

Benny, Great experiment!

This is a great forum.
 
Two different things.

And meat doesn't really 'absorb' smoke; smoke particulates stick to the surface of the meat: adsorption. Though some volatiles might mix a bit with surface moisture, moisture is evaporating. What of the volatiles that might end up below the surface of the meat would be fairly minimal, as Bill alludes, and hardly absorption.
 
So at 140 Deg F the ring stops growing. However the meat still absorbs the smoke flavor. So how long should you smoke a chunk of meat? I've read here that 1/4 to 1/3 of the cooking time. Is this correct?
 
Van, it's all about personal tastes. You could keep layering on the smoke till the end, but most start with x amount of smoke-wood at the beginning, wait till the white smoke dissipates and settle in on the thin blue smoke which is the key .
How that relates to fractions of a cooking time I dunno.
Experiment and have fun:wsm:

Tim
 
Van, Timothy is 100% correct, and you can smoke the entire time if your smoke is clean. IMHO, there's two ways to get good smoke on a wsm. You can either load up 6-8 wood chunks at the beginning and wait 30-45 minutes for TBS, OR bury and ring wood where it's not in contact with lit charcoal at the start of the cook. Gary Wiviott advocates the first method, and it works great. The smoke lasts longer with the second method, though, but the object is to get the wood to start smoking SLOWLY. Works great with dumping lit (ala the Minion the method) onto the MIDDLE of a pile of lump and putting the wood around the edges where the lit isn't.
 
Alton Brown would know! LOL. Interesting info though. Seems to lend itself to the notion of putting meat straight from the fridge to the smoker.
 
Tim, Dave

Blue smoke. So, if I choose the 1st method by waiting for the BS, what if yop need more wood? Will this not provide the WS as well or will it matter at this piont? I guess I just need more Grill'n time to find the sweet spot. Er, Um... The Blue smoke.
 
I've read about this. There seems to be some folks that put the chilled meat on the grill giving the meat more time to grow the smoke ring till it reaches 140 Deg F
Michael M. said:
Alton Brown would know! LOL. Interesting info though. Seems to lend itself to the notion of putting meat straight from the fridge to the smoker.
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Van said:
Tim, Dave

Blue smoke. So, if I choose the 1st method by waiting for the BS, what if yop need more wood? Will this not provide the WS as well or will it matter at this piont? I guess I just need more Grill'n time to find the sweet spot. Er, Um... The Blue smoke.
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With the first method, you shouldn't really need to add any more wood unless doing a long butt or brisket cook. Nothing wrong with adding a chunk to the fire if you want to, though.
 
The smoke RING has absolutely nothing to do with smoke. I can produce a beautiful smoke ring on meat in my indoor OVENand not smoke up the house.
Smoke ring is a chemical reaction and nothing more, although heating the meat in the presence of smoke can and will produce a great smoke ring.
 
Greg Blonder posted about the amount of smoke deposited based on both moisture and temperature. His discussion of his experiments and findings are --> here


Smoke Ring Trivia:

Also, in terms of the smoke ring, Joe Cordray at Iowa State University wrote, "When a smoke ring develops in barbecue meats it is not because smoke has penetrated and colored the muscle, but rather because gases in the smoke interact with the pigment myoglobin." He continues by pointing out, "During burning the nitrogen in the logs combines with oxygen (O) in the air to form nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Nitrogen dioxide is highly water-soluble. The pink ring is created when NO2 is absorbed into the moist meat surface and reacts to form nitrous acid. The nitrous acid then diffuses inward creating a pink ring via the classic meat curing reaction of sodium nitrite."

So it is not smoke but it is gasses involved with the combustion of your wood, charcoal, chips, or whatever interacting with meat chemically. Cured meats show the "smoke ring" coloration as well as they react under temperature to the air and gasses around them.
 
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Dave, I have been having trouble getting the blue smoke. I have been using the minion method, burying some wood chunks in the unlit charcoal and putting some on top after I pour on the lit charcoal. I have been putting the meat on immediately, but for the first 30-45 minutes I just get tons of white smoke pouring out of every crevice of the WSM. Then it doesn't seem like there is any smoke at all.

It sounds like I should should be waiting until the white smoke dissipates before putting on the meat? With your option 2 with the wood not touching the lit charcoal then won't it take a long time to start smoking?
 
I've been perplexed myself by the notion of blue smoke. I bury some chunks in the unlit charcoal, add lit on top (minion) and add a chunk on top of the lit. The "tons of white smoke" seems to calm down after about 15 minutes or so and does not cause any oversmoke flavor. Though you should add less wood on top than you might without burying chunks in the unlit which will catch later. Sometimes for chicken or fish I might wait 15 min for the smoker to settle and the lit charcoal to settle down and then quickly throw a chunk of wood in through the door--let the red-hot lit consume some oxygen and cool down slightly and then the wood chunk is on cooler coals with less oxygen.

Best I can tell you just don't want to have burning, flaming wood and black smoke happening--which doesn't happen in the wsm if you have the vents at 50 or 25%.

I did see a post on another board where a guy puts 4 fist sized chunks of wood in his chimney over a gas burner for 5-10 minutes to "blacken them up" which he claims takes care of the initial combustion on the surface of the wood before throwing them on the coals.
 
Gil Rohde said:
Dave...It sounds like I should should be waiting until the white smoke dissipates before putting on the meat? With your option 2 with the wood not touching the lit charcoal then won't it take a long time to start smoking?
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Exactly, and like I said, it's a matter of timing. Don't be too caught up in seeing an actual "blue" color, though, and if using water in the pan, forget about it in lower humidity since the steam is obviously visible. Although the steam is visibly quite light, it's not gonna be blue, and that combined with the actual smoke can make it look heavier than it actually is. Another thing..."option two" isn't my preference when dumping lit onto unlit briquettes. Too few lit briqs on top of unlit briqs won't burn nice and clean for quite a while, but you can dump as little lit lump onto a ring of lump and it should almost immediately burn quite clean. One option if you like briqs for long cooks is to put some briqs in the ring on the bottom, lump on top of that, and then light with briqs.
 
Chris E said:
I've been perplexed myself by the notion of blue smoke...I did see a post on another board where a guy puts 4 fist sized chunks of wood in his chimney over a gas burner for 5-10 minutes to "blacken them up" which he claims takes care of the initial combustion on the surface of the wood before throwing them on the coals.
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Try that at the end of a cook when all the meat is off. ;) "5-10 minutes" isn't nearly long enough to do what the poster is suggesting.
 
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