Chris asked us on Facebook: “How should I prepare wood chips before adding them to a grill?”
The test cooks at America’s Test Kitchen answer your cooking questions straight from the kitchen.
To ask a question, tweet us @TestKitchen or ask us on Facebook:
Due to the high volume of questions, we are not able to answer every single one. We try our best, but the test cooks have to get back to testing recipes!
America’s Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full-time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most-foolproof recipe.
Twitter:
Facebook:
source
7 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This is so wrong. Don't ever soak chips! You're using steam, not smoke, and you're delaying the time it takes to do that initial burn off of impurities in the wood, meaning your going to get "dirty smoke", impurities injected into your food, which means bitter taste and most likely an upset stomach, followed by a desire to not BBQ/smoke food again. Disappointing America's Test Kitchen! Just goes to show you that so many "pros" out there don't know what they are talking about, just like with any topic. Is what it is. Good luck people! Just get out and cook and test for yourself. Don't believe anything you see or hear on the internet.
Yeah. So how long? Lol.
HOW DO YOU CALL YOURSELF EXPERTS AND GIVE INSANELY STUPID ADVICE? WHEN YOU SOAK CHIPS, ALL YOU DO IS CREATE STEAM – NOT SMOKE. IF YOU WANT TO LULL YOURSELF INTO DREAMLAND AND BELIEVE WHAT YOU ARE SEEING IS SMOKE… HAVE AT IT. ONCE YOU SOAK YOUR CHIPS, ALL YOU ARE NOW DOING IS WAITING FOR THOSE CHIPS TO DRY OUT BEFORE THEY START GIVING OFF SMOKE. SEEMS REDUNDANT TO WET YOUR CHIPS AND WAIT FOR THEM TO DRY! CMON EXPERTS! WAKE UP ON THIS ONE!
Any chef that soaks wood chips or chunks should be fired and never be allowed anywhere near a BBQ ever again. It is one of the most pointless and stupid things you can do with wood. The reason you cannot use wood immediatly after you cut down a tree to smoke is because it has to cure for about 6 months or kiln dried. That will bring the internal moisture of wood to around 5-10% so it can smoke properly when using it for cooking. Adding that moisture back, or attempting to, is counter productive and ruins the wood.
Noooooo. America’s test kitchen have you actually tested this? Wood does not absorb water well (see boats) so it stays very superficial. When you put it on the coals all it does is cool the coals until the water boils off, then it burns.
It would have been nice if you mentioned how long you soak them for.
Im so confused pittmasters always say they don't soak because instant flame gives the thin blue smoke they want. But you say flame is bad. What is it?