How to Use Liquid Smoke

• Maurice E. Terry

The first question arises to anyone’s mind, what is this liquid smoke? Liquid smoke is a watery substance, which helps to cause burning wood or charcoal flavor into your ribeye steak or pork fillet. It is also known as concentrated smoke. The process of making concentrated smoke is similar to making the beer. First, they burn the wood in a closed boiler, when it produces vapor they condense that smoke and give it a liquid form. To intensify the smoky flavor, they concentrate the watery solution into cold storage and filter the unwanted substances.

After making the liquid, they bottled it up for distribution. Some of the concentrated smoke distributors add other ingredients like salt, vinegar, sugar, molasses, artificial coloring, etc. though most of the product has fresh burning wood flavor. American company Wright’s first sold the liquid smoke product and keeps up the work until now, yet thousands of companies are producing verities of liquid smoke bottles today.

However, if you ready to make real smokehouse, build big aluminum wood burning chamber and cook your meat or fish there, you are very much welcome to do that. We can understand that you are authentic people, who are not satisfied until he gets the original of everything. However, for those, who have neither the finance nor the time to take that hassle, are welcome to join us, because we will be going to use every bit of liquid smoke for our smoke flavor home cooking. There are many kinds of liquid available that can be found anywhere in the world.

Liquid with different ingredients is also accessible at any supermarket. Liquid smoke flavor ingredients commonly are Water, salt, sugar, Natural Hickory, Vinegar, Molasses and Carmel Color. You may choose as youy need for your cooking items. However, the common ingredients used in making Smokey foods are molasses, liquid amino, brown sugar and smoked salt.

Liquid Smoke Uses

Now, you want to know what kind of foods you can cook with the real smoke method. Thus, we are here to give you some liquid smoke recipes.

How to Use Liquid Flavor

Liquid smoke is an excellent substitute of barbecue sauce, that’s why you can use it to any recipe to give meaty, smoky flavor to it. A small quantity like one or two spoons will do, but you can always make it smokier by giving more drops to the food. This is a concentrated form of smoke in a liquid substance, so you had better be careful because adding more sometimes can be damaging for your foods. It will taste like fake, strong or chemical if you use too much of it. Slow cooking kalua pig to vegan bacon, you can use the flavor to anything.

With liquid smoke ingredients, vegans can apply this to their vegan food items because the liquid flavor is a vegan item itself while spreading the meaty flavor to the dish. You may not like the liquid taste. You eat bacon of all kind from the super shop than you are logically wrong because they use this liquid in all types of bacon. Don’t pour all the drops at once, drop a bit and taste it, if more is needed to add more, repeat this until you get the exact level of flavor you wanted. That’s how you use the concentrated smoke to your food to enhance the flavor and give the smokiness.

Substitute for Liquid Smoke

If you don’t like liquid smoke whereas you are out of your favorite liquid smoke bottle, don’t panic! You can always use a classic smoky cooking method to have the same result as your liquid smoke. Although, if you still in short of proper tools and ingredients to give a smoky flavor to your dish, look out for other substitutes of concentrated smoke. We are going to describe the liquid smoke substitute in the later section.

Spanish Smoke Paprika

This element is oaked smoked dry paper, which remained on the smoke chamber at least for two weeks. Two types of smoke paprika you can use, one is sweet paprika, and the other one is hot. The use depends on your taste and how you like to have it.

Chipotle Powder

This one is made out of jalapeno papers that are smoked in natural wood. The chipotle powder also has two variations, one is made from the red jalapeno, and the other one is from the green jalapeno, though the green one is expensive than the red one.

Smoke Tea

Smoke tea is also known as Russian Caravan. This natural tealeaf has unique substance, which gets active when it soaked into hot water. After a few minutes, you can efficiently use the wet leaves or the juice to your prepared meat, to get the smoky flavor.

Recently, there are some concerns, especially from the European Food Safety Authority that liquid smoke can be toxic and lethal. However, no concrete proof can certify that the concentrated smoke flavor is toxic. On the contrast, we can say that liquid smoke is better than real wood smoke because natural wood smoke contains many substances, which are harmful to the human body. At the end it doesn’t matter how dangerous or healthy the liquid is, people who love to eat smoky food like you and me, we will always go for it and have our stomach full.