If you love meat, you sure know how delicious smoked meat is. If you’ve never tried making one before and want to try your hand at it, there are a few things you need to consider and prepare before smoking your first piece of meat. It takes time, knowledge and experience to properly do it.
Here is a small guide for beginners – follow these expert tips on smoking meat at home:
Choose the right smoker
There are different types of smokers out in the market and each type has their own advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right one for you depends on your own personal needs. Here is a quick list of the different types of smokers:
- Wood – Produces the purest flavour for meats, but requires the most attention because a constant temperature is hard to maintain. Not ideal for beginners.
- Pellet – Works similarly to a wood smoker but easier to use. Just load up the pellets into a compartment and will instantly do the work. However, these can be expensive.
- Electric – Easy to use and the easiest to control in terms of temperature. However, they provide the least smoky flavour to food and is the most expensive out of all smokers.
- Propane – Works similarly to an electric smoker but instead of electricity, uses a gas-fueled flame.
- Charcoal – The favorite of many because it’s cheap and gives food more smokiness compared to the electric and gas varieties. The downside is you have to keep buying charcoal and also build and maintain a fire manually.
Choose the right type of wood
There are different types of wood you can use for smoking and each one affects your food differently. Some wood are better for certain proteins while others are used best with certain cuts of meat.
One popular type is alder, which is best used for any white meat. Maple works great for poultry and ham. Cherrywood is ideal for pork and other red meat. Oak is best for bigger and thicker cuts of meat that takes a long time to cook.
Choose the right cuts of meat
When choosing cuts of meat, go for the ones that would benefit the most from smoking. Those fatty cuts will cause beautiful marbling therefore ideal. Pork shoulder and beef brisket are good cuts of meat to start with if you’re a beginner.
Follow these 3 expert tips on smoking meat for beginners!