New to Smoking Meats? What You Need to Know

There’s more than one way to cook up some meat. While the traditional method is to grill in on your Weber or other BBQ, you might be missing out on a whole world of flavour and a chance to impress your guests. Let’s take a look at how to use a smoker BBQ, and make a real impression when entertaining. But first, a brief history about smoking meats may be in order.

Since the Dawn of Mankind

Smoking food dates back to our primitive ancestors. Since we lived in caves or simple huts and shacks and used fire to keep warm, these places would become very smoky. We used to hang meat up to dry it and we soon noticed that the meat near the smoke would take on a different flavour, and was preserved better than meat that was simply dried! 

Over time this process evolved and became a method of preserving food that often required curing the meat in salt or brine. This could take days at a time.

These days, things are much easier and devices like smoker barbecues and wood fireplaces make smoking our own meat, in the comfort of the backyard, an easily achievable task.

Vertical or Horizontal?

Let’s check out a couple of different methods of smoking your meat.

The Vertical Method

This method is sometimes called smoker cooking or smoke roasting. The trick is to keep the heat as far as possible from the food, letting the indirect heat cook the meat. You have your fire at the bottom level of your grill or barbeque, with the meat at the top.

The Horizontal Method

You can also have a horizontal set-up, where the firebox, smoking agent and meat are all in the same chamber. You can do this by using a regular grill, you don’t need anything special. Just set it up for indirect grilling.

How Long?

One of the questions that smoking novices often ask is how long they should smoke their meat for. As a rule of thumb, you should smoke for an hour and a half per 500 grams. So if you have a kilo of meat to smoke, allow for three hours of smoking. This can seem like a long time, but your taste buds will thank you for it.

Other Tips

It’s important to keep a low temperature when smoking; otherwise, you can “soot” the food and ruin the whole thing. You want a nice, light smoked flavour, not an acrid burned one. You want to be aiming for that woody flavour combined with the tenderness of the perfectly cooked meat.

Need to Know More?

Please feel free to get in touch with the friendly team from Heat & Grill. We’re happy to share our expert advice. With the best knowledge and a great product range, you’ll be perfectly smoking your meat in no time.