Smoking in a pot

1 Servings

Ingredients

Quantity Ingredient
*****None*****

Directions

Universally popular food flavor comes from an ancient form of food preservation smoking. Different regions of the world obviously had different aromatic woods. For example, the famous hickory, mesquite or alder. Other areas lacked wood all together and used herbs or even tea for their smokes. I have adapted a Chinese tea smoke idea that imparts a very light, delicate. sweetish quality to poultry or fish. The technique is extremely useful for Minmax cooks because the smoked flavors are unusual enough to absorb the diner's interest so that the dishes very low content isn't immediately obvious. Then I surround the smoked meal with bright, fresh crisp foods and a yogurt spread; the rich juiciness of the chicken or fish seems to actually tingle with added flavor. Be careful what type of cookware you use to smoke. It must be either cast aluminum or cast iron.

Please avoid bonded alloys --the dry heat can melt them and you ,wind up with a giant hole in the pot and an ingot of metal forever welded to you stove top! With a little ingenuity and a deep heavy Dutch oven, you can balance a second expanding steamer platform on the first and double the amount of chicken or fish for large parties.

USES: So far I have used this technique on fish and chicken. I have no doubt that it could work well with veal, pork or even lamb. When once you 've been bitten by the smoke bug and used different kinds of woods as well as tea leaves mixed with rosemary or thyme - literally the sky is the limit.

You may want to set aside a large Dutch oven exclusively for smoke foods.

One last point, I suggest you wrap up the foil used in smoking and put it out in the trash. It does have a way of leaving residual aromas. Posted to Digest eat-lf.v097.n115 by marciaf@... (Marcia A Fasy) on Apr 30, 1997

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