Smoked Meat

[Fishboy]

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Thanks Brian,
now the real secret. Smoked cheese?

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No real secret with smoked cheese, Wyatt. Just about any type of cheese can be smoked including my favorite Monterey Jack and Provolone, but also Swiss, Colby, Mozzarella, Havarti, Jarlsburg, Stilton, Gouda and a host of others.

I buy my cheeses for smoking in larger quantities from Costco and cut them to half-pound brick portions. I keep the bricks in the refrigerator until just before smoking to firm up the cheese, then smoke them on the top rack. You have to be careful and watch that your cheese doesn't melt through the grates. This won't be a problem if you've cooled the cheese before smoking, and if you've placed the cheese in the coolest part of the smoker. Again, my smoker is six feet tall and I use the upper rack for cheeses. Anything closer to the smoke source just melts and makes a mess.

One thing I haven't mentioned in this thread is my source of chips. While I like the idea of Ohia or any other locally available wood, I don't have the patience to cut the wood, dry it, and store it. I buy hickory chips in the barbecue section at Safeway for $2.50 a bag.

I process my cheese with two loads of chips, where one load is just more than 1/4 of a bag. I find that I don't use the upper racks as often as the lower (for salmon and jerky), so the cheeses will pick up the dark smoke residue from the rack and this gives the cheese a neat-looking set of dark stripes as well as taking on the darker color of the smoke. You should turn the bricks when you open the smoker between loads of chips, and you'll get these rack marks on both sides.

Cheese right out of the smoker is really good, it's all warm and pliable with a coating of oils that've seeped out, but I've found the cheese does better if vacuum sealed and stored in the refer for a few weeks. The smokey flavor then has a chance to permeate the brick and the overall flavors are improved.

These bricks of smoked cheeses really get the compliments when I take them to parties or give them as gifts. I can't over-emphasize that the use of a vacuum sealer produces the best results.

Mahalo nui loa,
Brian and Mary
Lynnwood, WA\Discovery Harbour

Edited by - fishboy on 08/20/2007 01:44:33