[CH] Re: Dedicated Grills, smoking peppers

Alex Silbajoris (asilbajo@hotmail.com)
Wed, 25 Jul 2001 14:51:44 

>From: Matt Prerost <mprerost@home.com>

>I accidently erased some of this thread so I don't know how much the
>other pod heads clean their smokers.  Maybe someone could tell me.  I
>haven't got around to smoking peppers yet and would like to know what
>all they clean prior to smoking peppers.  Currently I clean the
>grills, water pan, and get rid of the ashes in the bottom of the
>smoker.


I have several large and small grills at hand, but none of them are 
dedicated to one kind of food.  None of them are really smokers, more like 
grills, so the smoking I do tends to be a lot hotter and faster than most 
techniques.  I have to be very careful with the heat and the time.  
Basically, my pepper-smoking results break down into two main categories:

1. Cooked and softened, possibly with a moderate amount of char, but still 
flexible.  Typically, I can pull the stems/seed masses right out of them 
after cooking.  These can be chopped into a dish or whizzed into a sauce - 
I've had some nice results this way.  Try smoking a head of garlic at the 
same time and combining both flavors into one dish.

2. Crisped.  Black.  Crunchy.  Suitable for grinding into a smoked pepper 
powder along the lines of Jim's apple-smoked habs.  (I try to avoid 
duplicating his product, by using maple or hickory instead of apple.)  Once 
in a while this goes too far, and the peppers are uselessly burned.  A jar 
of this powder is Much Fun to Sprinkle on things like cheese dishes, bean 
dishes, wherever you want heat and smoke at the same time.  It goes very 
well into seasoning mixes such as a rub for pork.  In the future, I want to 
use this technique to smoke moderately-hot peppers to get a seasoning with 
more smoke than heat.

A few years ago, Jim gave me some smoked habs that were still whole.  They 
resembled Satan's ping-pong balls, light and thin-walled.  I could see that 
they had puffed up with steam before they toasted and crisped.  One had 
burst before setting, and it looked like one of the high-speed pictures of a 
balloon bursting ... or like a scream of agony, fixed in ebony habanero.

Cameron has a better smoker, with an offset firebox, so he can produce 
something much closer to a traditional chipotle.  Someplace I read that one 
technique is to smoke the peppers with banana leaves, but I was never able 
to find a confirmation of this - I really wonder what flavor those leaves 
would give to the peppers.

If you're curious about smoking peppers, give it a try even if you have to 
sacrifice some batches in the learning process.  It's nice to have a unique 
product that you made yourself.

Kaff kaff,

- A



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