The Taste of Smoke

I’ve been trying to capture the taste of smoke for years. Pipe tobacco, mezcal, dark roast coffee, burnt wood, charcoal, lapsang tea leaves…

Smoke is one of my favorite things in the world, of course, other than rain. Put me on a porch next to a fire ring during a light thunderstorm and I will never leave. If I could elect a life in which a billow of smoke surrounded me at all times, like Pigpen’s dust cloud, I would chose it every day. There is something so calming about it to me. The smell is rustic, nostalgic, natural, but packed full of nuts, fruit, earth, and leather like an Appalachian pantry.

I think too, its one of the only visuals we have of wind. Wind becomes an animate object for brief seconds, like dropping dye into a body of water to see which way the current flows; the mysterious autonomy of wind revealed.

Smoke, if you’re reading this, I love you and I will continue to try and capture you until the day that I die.

Here are some of my favorite applications, in food and drink, of the taste of smoke that have gotten me close in my pursuit of the beastie:

Smoked Salts

In food, I’ve started to finish with a smoked flaky salt rather than an a regular flaky or a coarse kosher. It adds a small depth or complexity that could come from maybe a different oil choice, sauce, vegetable, etc. but, is there in hand for the final sprinkle. Even on simple eggs it adds a nice savory layer. This is one I am using now:

In drink, it is a common practice to add salt to bind flavors together, like how you would in cooking. Salt is most often dissolved into a liquid known as saline solution (best ratio I’ve come across is 80% water : 20% salt). This salt content helps sours and sugars mingle, brings out more subtle notes in spirits, and rolls off harsh edges of bitterness. Most always saline solution calls for unflavored kosher, but, during research and development for a holiday menu I had the thought of using different salts not only to enhance flavor but to add flavor as well. My goal was an Old Fashioned riff that leaned nutty and roasty as if you were drinking it by a hearth. My saline component was salt solution made with hickory salt, which is salt smoked for hours over hickory wood. The end result was an awesome balance of nutty warm flavors from maple and walnut that finished with lingering smoke and hickory wood.

Tobacco Bitters

Tobacco has to be one of my favorite companions of smoke, specifically pipe tobacco. I started down the rabbit hole of infusing some of my favorite tobacco blends into spirits the only problem being, not only does alcohol extract aromas and flavors of tobacco, it also extracts nicotine content, in amounts that are unpredictable and therefore dangerous to serve. My Golden Angel came in the form of a small batch, San Fransisco based, bitters company called Bitter Queens. They focus on many different “off-the-beaten-path” bitters flavors, their opus, to me, being their Tobacco Bitters—hints of clove/vanilla/smoke as if drawing on a cavendish blend and finished with a dry almost tannic leather taste like the tobacco pipe just left your lips.

Red Cedar

In long pondering what the actual scent of smoke is, my most updated hypothesis states it’s mostly just the smell of wood, and if it’s going to be any wood, let’s make it red cedar. You know when you are in the same room as a block of red cedar. The scent of red cedar, to me, is the cozy/warm parts of smoke—the parts that remind you of the old wood paneled lake house, the late night around the fire ring with your high school best friends, or thick blankets at Christmas.

100% red cedar incense is, in my opinion, one of the best concentrations of the heavenly fragrance. You can burn it around The Tabletop while your crew feasts and kills monsters—guaranteed to set the tone. Or, I’ve used the same cedar incense in a fragrance infusion to mist on top of an evergreen lilted martini (not of my own creation). 3-4 cones of red cedar crushed into powder, 250ml of 190 proof full grain alcohol, and 2-3 cinnamon sticks rested for 3 days then strained yields an unbelievable snapshot of an old wooden ski lodge; roaring fires, hot cocoa, fresh evergreens. Bottle the creation in an atomizer and spritz over any beverage intended to take you somewhere wild.

Another beverage honorable mention for red cedar is the smoking block. I am not necessarily an advocate of the technique and don’t often use it in programs or menus. However, smoke undeniably does affect beverages, glassware, and the drinking experience, and it’s always beneficial to study different techniques. I have a few red cedar hunks pulled from a construction project at an old job, instead of shaving them down and lighting them in a silly amazon hat-for-my-glass, I just take a torch to the wood itself and place a glass upside down on top of the burn spot letting the trapped billow adhere to as much of the glass as it can. Again, not my favorite application of smoke. I know there’s many other ways to introduce smoke into beverage, I personally would rather it feel more natural than forced. I did recently use these blocks to char thinly sliced orange garnishes for a woody Negroni riff I worked on. This allowed the sugars of the fruit to burn and adhere to the cedar so that when dropped in the glass, the fruit/wood combination was still smoking. This also, in accordance with my secret evil plan, made the bar smell of glorious cedar smoke all night long.