Hi all, I am very interested to find out as much as possible about the process of smoking meat, including the history, preparations, methods, uses etc. With this in mind, I would like to suggest a topic that would explore those issues and many more. Thank you very much.
As you can tell by my Avetar picture, I too love to smoke almost anything.
For some history and some background on both hot and cold smoke, you can try: "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing" by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.
I myself got my initiation at a smokehouse here in Buffalo, NY which has a very large number of places purporting to be authentic BBQ.
The rest of my experience has been a (luckily) large amount of travel for work, searching the internet and cook books, and finally experimenting with everything. I take extensive notes on the chance a recipe, rub, process or technique works well.
Another fun book was: "Dinosaur Bar-B-Que: An American Roadhouse" by John Stage, Nancy Radke, and James Scherzi. The Dinosaur originated in Syracuse as a physical establishment but the owners learned their craft the hard way, on the road. This book pointed out the fun with experimenting. BBQ is not just for the meats.
Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s book “Charcuterie” is indeed a brilliant source of information and required reading for my Culinary Arts Degree Course here in Ireland. This book is very clarifying regarding the processes, but for my theses, I need to go a lot further and research the health implications the smoking of food might have.
Harold McGee says in On Food and Cooking (1984) "Smoke is a very complex material, with upward of 200 components that include alcohols, acids, phenolic compounds, and various toxic, sometimes carcinogenic substances. The toxic substances inhibit the growth of microbes, and the phenolics retard fat oxidation, and the whole complex imparts the characteristic flavour of burning wood to the meat."
Smoking our food was once necessary as a method of preservation and only practiced for that purpose for a very long time. If Mr. McGee is correct, should we not refrain from the practice of smoking our food instead of trying to find new items i.e. garlic, paprika, salt, cheese, etc that we might think would appeal to the consumer treated in that way. Any thoughts????
Another consideration is the TCP (tinted Curing Powder) or nitrites sometimes used to cure a product before smoking and a cancer risk. However here is a summary from one study on thisThe nitrite exposure of the average consumer by consumption of nitrite-cured meat productsis estimated and compared with nitrite exposures from other sources such as reduction ofdietary nitrate and physiological formation of nitrite from endogenous nitrogen monoxide, NO.Nitrite from meat products presents only a small fraction of the total nitrite burden. Further,selected epidemiological case-control studies which search for associations between con-sumption of nitrite-cured meat products and stomach or brain cancer are reviewed. It is concluded that these studies do not reveal an association of consumption of nitrite-curedmeat products and cancer.
I found a very interesting article on Barbeque from a South Carolina perspective and the author was kind enough to let me use it on the site. I think some BBQ fans from Texas might take issue with the assertions in the article but it is none the less a good read.
Culinary Forum 
