This makes this a fairly unique variety pack. You don’t see that one very often, even in and around Georgia peach cooking is usually done incorporating actual peaches into the cooking (like as a sauce base) rather than a smoking wood in my experience. This is great mix of wood chips for smoking meats you want to slather with Kansas city style sauces (to up the sweetness), or as an offset to more savory spices, rubs, and sauces down the line.
#Wood smoking flavor chart plus
This is also the variety pack that lives very much on the sweet side of the flavor spectrum, with a collection of three fruit woods (apple, cherry, and peach) plus maple wood. These are some hefty chunks, much larger and thicker than most of the smoking chips on this list. It’s pretty hard to do better than this in terms of both variety and cost efficiency, but one other package gives Camerons a run for their money. The packs are easy to open and reseal, and you get a solid amount of each: 1 pint of each wood (good for roughly 30 batches of smoked food) so for the price it’s an excellent deal. This is great for smoking cheese, poultry, seafood, lamb, pork and beef. The cherry then comes in to give you a sweeter finish if you want it, but is overall a more subtle sweetness than you get from many other fruit woods, so it is likewise good in a more savory blend as well. This variety pack trends towards the more savory side, with the hickory and oak woods’ more standout flavors, while the more neutral alder wood lends itself well for both savory and sweeter cooking. Each type of wood brings something interesting to the table in terms of flavor profile, and all complement each other well if you want to experiment with blending wood flavors together. You get a pack of 4 resealable containers, perfect for any kind of smoking endeavor. This is a top notch selection of high quality wood chips. Read More: Learn Soaking The Wood Chips And The Great Use For Smoker Box. All are perfect to use in all occasions and annual celebrations. The most popular 4 flavors are apple, hickory, oak, and cherry for a reason they all work well together. It is also important to point out that there are considerations on what wood chips to use and how much you need to use based on the type of smoker you have if you have an electric smoker or a traditional one. It’s light and pairs well with just about any type of meat, and has a strong but subtle flavor that doesn’t overpower much, but really shine through even when paired with flavors that are overall more up front than it. They all taste exactly like the fruit that comes from them, pretty much.Īpple is the real standout here, being so common especially in the north. Sweet WoodsĬherry, apple, and maple are the common kinds here. Alder is sort of the hickory of those kinds of flavors if you’ve ever had professionally smoked ham, kielbasa, fish or lamb, it was probably alder. It has a light flavor that really complements softer tasting dishes very well, like fish. It makes smoke well but has an extremely light flavor overall, and is best mixed with other woods in my opinion.Īlder wood is the final common savory wood. Oak is a common “filler” wood for lack of a better term. It is a very strong flavor that can drown out weaker tastes if you’re not careful as a result it’s mostly used on beef. Mesquite is another backbone wood, though largely of the southwestern barbeque traditions.
It is probably the most distinctive pure barbeque flavor out there. Most smoked meats are described as “smoky” BECAUSE they taste like hickory along with the char. That’s the best way to describe it, honestly, as vague as that sounds.
It is in large part the backbone of most smoking traditions I’m familiar with, and so is one of the most commonly used woods. Hickory is your bread and butter wood here. Let’s go over the most common types of woods, starting with the savory options. There are two main types of smoker chip woods: sweet and savory types.Īll woods are going to have a certain amount of savoriness to them, but fruit woods especially have a fruity sweet kick to them that other woods lack. The main selling point here is what flavor the wood is what trees it comes from, in other words. Smoking chips are (unless you buy extremely bottom of the barrel stuff, which you almost have to go out of your way to do) pretty much all the same quality. To answer that overall question, you need to ask another: what kind of flavor do you want to put in your food? What Kind of Smoking Chips Should I Look For?