Why Use A Water Smoker?

By Paul Yates

In order to understand why you would want to use a water smoker we need first of all to distinguish between two types of smoking.

The first is smoking for preservation and this is what I would call the traditional smoking that has evolved through the ages and was (before the invention of canning or the refrigerator) one of the most important ways to prevent meat from spoiling. The smoking is actually only part of the process and is the final part, the fist part is to dry the meat or cure it.

In essence, to make a good smoked product ie. one that is going to keep and not go rotten, it’s important to remove a significant amount of moisture content from the meat. Even now there are regulations that determine how a product may be labelled as smoked or barbecue and part of meeting that regulation is to be able to demonstrate that you product has lost dry weight to the tune of 30%. Examples of food cooked this way include jerky and pastrami.

The second type of smoking is the hot smoking or barbecue that we do in our backyard or buy down at our local BBQ pit. In this instance it’s not about preservation is simply about flavor and texture ie. a great dining experience. We’re looking for succulence and tenderness to our food, not something that’s dry and chewy.

This second type of smoking actually originated in ancient China where water ovens were extremely common and it was only when it came to America and folks started passing smoke through the oven that the hot smoking process of barbecue as we know it today came into existence. So here you have it, the birth of the water smoker.

Water smoking does exactly what I’ve already described, the result is a moist, succulent piece of meat with minimal shrinkage and this is achieved because the smoker oven is set at approximately 225F or 110C (just above boiling point) and this allows the water in the bath to gradually vaporize. The meat is set above the water bath so that it steams as it cooks.

The other advantage to using a water bath is that the water itself acts as a thermal store and helps to moderate the temperature of the oven should there be significant changes in the heat supply. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to tend your water smoker and make sure that everything is progressing steadily but it does meant that should your fire start to die, the thermal store in the water will help prevent a dramatic loss in oven temperature in the short term.

The disadvantage of cooking this way is that it takes about double the time that it would take to cook in a conventional oven because of the lower temperatures but that’s all part of the fun right?

To conclude, when setting up a water smoker it’s important that the water bath and oven are up to the correct temperature before inserting the food. To speed this up it’s useful to use hot water and certainly while tending always top up the water bath with hot water otherwise you’ll destabilize the oven temperature. Likewise, never allow your water bath to run dry otherwise the residue in the bottom will burn and give off an odor that will taint your food.

About the Author: Paul Yates has written many reviews of

meat smokers

and he also writes

water smoker recipes

. Recently Paul produced his own set of

homemade smoker plans

.

Source:

isnare.com

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