Smoke wood too dry?


 
R

Ron Hunter

TVWBB Member
I've noticed that my smoked meat has been having less and less smoke flavor. I use cherry that I bought over 4 years ago - was fantastic until recently.

During Christmas I smoked 2 12lb turkeys (hi heat)the way I always do. I used about twice the amount of wood that I normally would use for 2 10lb butts.

Smelled great - little smoke flavor. We froze one of them - recently when we used it - again the smell was good but little smoke flavor. Even my wife noticed she couldn't taste the cherry smoke flavor.

My guess is the wood is too dry. Recommendations - use wood for coals but not smoke wood (or discard) or do you think that soaking the wood for a few days and then taking it out of the water about 24hr before using would allow the wood to smoke rather than burn.

BTW - I tried various other smoke woods. For my money nothing beats cherry for ANY meat. Even when it was fresh I never got any bitter flavor from oversmoking.

Thanks for the help
 
Well, yes.

Typically, a moisture content of 20% is about "ideal" for smoking.

But, since these have been drying for years, I doubt a few days would do any good. You'd probably have to soak for them for weeks or months - Should You Soak Wood Chunks?
 
Right, Travis. (Gee, I clicked on your link, then on the reply icon to bring up Chris' video about soaking chunks, only to suddenly hear Chris' voice as I started to type.
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The difficulty with any soaking is that wood just doesn't really want to take on the water at depth without the physiological process provided by the living cells. You can dry out those cells and destroy the process, but you can't re-create the life.

If you're going to want to keep wood around for years, keep it in plastic bags. Also, avoid kiln dried wood -- it is super dry and can never recover. Air dried wood is best. Just hope you don't get a fungus growing after all that time in plastic.

So final message, Ron? Use what you have as you want.

And, btw, although I love cherry also, red oak is also a great smoke wood. But the structure of RED OAK (not other oaks) is such that the extremely long cells that transport water cause it to actually be porous from end to end. (You can take a short length of red oak and blow bubbles in a container of water.) So soaking red oak for a long period will at least provide more moisture than most woods.

Rich
 
Good question Ron. I've been wondering the same thing myself. When I bought my WSM in 2005, I way overestimated the amount of wood I would use. As a result, I still have a pretty good supply of local apple, cherry and two kinds of oak that I chunked up at the time. Several things have changed since then, including the type of charcoal, not using the water pan, high heat cooks, etc. All in all though, my suspicions have been the same as yours. The wood just doesn't seem to produce the same level of flavor from the smoke.

So the question remains. Does the wood somehow "loose" it's flavor? Or does it simply burn up faster because it is so dry, and thus not expose the meat to it's "smoke" for as long a time?

Thanks all,

JimT
 
You could try soaking it, and if the results are not what you want, use the rest in your firepit and start over with fresher smokewood.
 
I consider smoke wood as a spice. And just like any spice that has sat on the storeroom shelves for years, it will loose some or a lot of flavor compared to a fresher product like Penzey's.
Smokinlicous makes a great point on Moisture content and they also have a Moisture table to check if your smoke wood is acceptable for re-hydration.
HTH

Tim
 
Thanks for the information. I've been working out of town until today or I would have posted earlier.

Since I'm completely out of smoked wonderments in the freezer - I'll soak some cherry and use it with chicken. Not the 4 butts I was planning. If the chicken's ok - then I'll do the butts. Altough maybe 2 at a time rather than 4!

I'll let you know how it turns out.
 
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