Smoked foods are my culinary passion, and the libraries have a
large number of books dealing with the art of smoke cooking — slow
cooking over a low heat source with various types of smoke to flavor the
food being cooked. Steven Raichlen is one of the gurus of BBQ and smoke
cooking, having put out such well-known cookbooks as
The Barbecue! Bible, How to Grill, Beer-Can Chicken, BBQ USA, and
Planet Barbecue
prior to this volume. Those earlier volumes dealt with the art of
cooking on a grill, and some of them included information about “smoke
cooking” but it wasn’t the focus of any of those titles. Project Smoke
is all about the smoke, and how best to incorporate it into the cooking
process.
In this 293-page tome, the first 55 pages and the last 30 pages are
highly-detailed guides to the mechanics and technical details of smoke
cooking — looks at the many different types of smokers on the market,
explorations of the differences between lump charcoal and briquettes as
your base burning fuel, the differences between forms (logs, chunks,
chips, sawdust) and types of wood, and their difference flavor profiles —
do you know your Hickory from your Mesquite, your Apple from your
Mulberry — and do you know which foods are best complimented by which
wood smokes? He includes detailed looks at the tools and accessories
necessary for successful smoke cooking, and he explores how to start and
effectively maintain a fire at the proper burn level. The section at
the back of the book compares and contrasts the features and drawbacks
of each type of smoker on the market — from upright barrel/drum smokers
(the type I personally use), to off-set barrels, ceramic/Kamado cookers,
gas/box smokers, pellet grills, stovetop smokers (for indoor cooking),
and even handheld smokers for introducing smoke flavors into cocktails.
As always, with Raichlen books, the majority of the content is
recipes — broken into ten categories: Starters, Beef, Pork, Lamb,
Burgers – Sausages -and More, Poultry, Seafood, Vegetables – Side Dishes
– and Meatless Smoking, Desserts, and Cocktails. Some of the more
intriguing recipes in this volume make me think I’m going to have to buy
a copy for myself. They include: “Deviled Smoked Eggs”, “Hay-Smoked
Mozzarella”, “Bacon-Crab Poppers”, “Home-Smoked Pastrami”, “Honey-Cured
Ham Ribs”, “Made-From-Scratch Bacon”, “Double Whisky-Smoked Turkey”,
“Smoked Shrimp Cocktail (with Chipotle-Orange Cocktail Sauce)”, “Salmon
Candy”, “Creamed Smoked Corn”, “Smoked Chocolate Bread Pudding”,
“Dragon’s Breath” (a bourbon cocktail that is served with smoke in the
glass), and “Bacon Bourbon” (bourbon infused with the flavor of smoked
bacon). Raichlen scatters sidebar articles throughout the entire book,
filled with fascinating and helpful factoids — things such as lists of
ingredients that can impart a smoke flavor when you don’t have the
equipment to actually smoke cook, or “You Can Smoke What? 28 Foods You
Never Dreamed You Could Smoke”.
My only complaint is that the use of photos is somewhat limited —
those photos that are included are gorgeous and very helpful in showing
what finished dishes should look like. But less than half the recipes
have corresponding photos. Still, this is a minor complaint in the
overall scheme of things, and I otherwise highly recommend this volume
to anyone who likes to cook with smoke.
[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try
The Barbecue! Bible and
Planet Barbecue, also by Steven Raichlen, or
Smoke & Spice, by Cheryl Alters Jamison.]
[ official
Steven Raichlen web site ]
Recommended by
Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library
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