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magazine (“Making Bacon,” June 2002, page 72), describes a method whereby he puts a few burning coals into a pie pan filled with wood chips or dust and sets it in a kettle grill. He then places a brine-cured pork loin inside the grill and smokes the pork for six to eight hours. This requires continual maintenance of the smoke as the coals burn out, but the resulting Canadian bacon is very good. If you brine a pork loin using the All-Purpose Brine (page 60), including 2 teaspoons/12 grams of pink salt in the brine, and then smoke it, you’ll have Canadian bacon. Aidells’s method of smoking on a grill is also a perfectly acceptable way to smoke your own pork belly for traditional bacon. In the same way that a pork loin (or a pork shoulder, for that matter) takes on a dark color and a rich smoky flavor, so too does cured pork belly.

HOT-SMOKING, COLD-SMOKING: DEFINITION AND METHOD

All of the following recipes, and many in the following chapter, involve smoke. Most recipes instruct the cook to “hot-smoke” a food.

To hot-smoke means to cook at or above 150 degrees F./65 degrees C. in a smoker. The temperature we recommend for hot-smoking is 180 degrees F./82 degrees C. for sausages (because of their higher fat content) and 200 degrees F./93 degrees C. for whole cuts, allowing for slow cooking and maximum smoke. If you have a smoker with a heat control, hot-smoke all these recipes at 200 degrees F./93 degrees C. unless otherwise specified.

If you don’t have a smoker, and are relying on ingenuity, then “hot-smoke” simply means smoking the item as you wish until its internal temperature reaches the desired temperature, measured on an instant-read thermometer (see page 28 for notes on thermometers). To smoke bacon, for instance, you might set five or six burning coals in a pan of hickory sawdust, set the pork belly on the rack, and cover the grill: add a few more coals after an hour. Once you see that you have good color on the bacon, you might finish it in a 200-degree-F./93-degree-C. oven, cooking it to the final temperature. Or, if you have a basic kettle smoker, you might simply make the lowest fire possible and cook the bacon entirely in this smoker, removing it when it reaches 150 degrees F./65 degrees C.

Cold-smoking is defined by a temperature of less than 100 degrees F./37 degrees C. and is difficult to achieve without the proper equipment. It’s possible to cold-smoke in the Bradley Smoker (opposite) by placing ice between the food and the smoke, but it’s difficult to maintain low temperatures over long periods.

Therefore, when a recipe here calls for cold-smoking, it assumes that you have a reliable smoke box that can stay below 100 degrees F./37 degrees C. indefinitely. If you don’t, we don’t recommend cold-smoking food. To cold-smoke the food, place it in the smoke box for the recommended time, making sure the temperature doesn’t rise, ideally, to above 90 degrees F./32 degrees C., and certainly no higher than 100 degrees F./37 degrees C.

If you’re the sort of cook who likes to improvise and jury-rig, tend fires, manage smoke, regulate the heat, and generally spend a lot of time hanging out with your food, you’ll have no problem with smoking. If that sounds like a headache to you, then just stick to conventional forms of smoking; that is, hot-smoking on a charcoal grill. Even if you have a good smoker, smoking food at lower temperatures takes care and attention.

Smoking and Food Safety

Most recipes involving smoking require pink salt, or sodium nitrite, as an insurance against the possibility of botulism poisoning. The spores that can produce the deadly nerve toxin botulism tend to thrive in smoking conditions (low temperatures over long periods, and the low-oxygen environment inside the smokebox). So in most instances of smoking we recommend using pink salt. Food that is smoke-roasted, however—that goes from the refrigerator into a hot smoker (300 degrees F./150 degrees C. or more)—does not require pink salt. (For a more detailed discussion of nitrites, nitrates, and botulism, see