I came across a couple of posts on here about smoking salts, and thought I'd give it a try over this weekend.
Turns out I had to work on my technique a little from my first attempts.
Hehehe.
So I'd read around and planned on smoking them for about 24 hours, and since I was worrying my pretty little head to be smoking that long, I wanted to test out a few different varieties.
Here are my main players: Coarse Kosher Salt, some coarse sea salt, lemon extract, orange extract (and some orange zest, not pictured) and some "essence of rosemary" (aka fresh rosemary leaves steeped in cheap a$$ grain alcohol.)
I have to say, I never really envisioned myself using knockoff-brand Everclear for a work related experiment, but I'm glad I finally found a use for some of that bottle that's been sitting in my liquor cabinet for eons.
I put the kosher salt in the cold smoker box on my MAK on a double layer of tinfoil, and spritzed half with a mixture of the rosemary extract and lemon extract.
The coarse sea salt I divided into five parts: One went in my griddle with no flavoring, one was put in a fine screen colander (wanted to test the 'smokiness' factor between being on a flat pan vs. a screen surface), and the other three went onto a splatter guard screen and flavored. One had orange, one had lemon, and one had lemon rosemary.
This is the three flavored sea salts after about 4 hours. The top left one is the lemon, the bottom left is orange, and the greenish one on the right is the rosemary lemon.
I stirred the salts gently every few hours as I was running back and forth from the barn to the house all day. I did notice I lost a lot of the finer particles of the salt with the ones on the screens, but didn't really mind since I planned to use these as coarse 'finishing salts' anyway.
They slowly started turning a grayish/brown color over the course of the day, and after making sure the hopper was full, I tucked them in for bed.
After my attempts to sleep in were thwarted by this little bugger (who started shaking uncontrollably after I ignored him for a good ten minutes, lest I forget he was perching there), I went and checked on the salts.
James and I could taste a little of the citrus flavors on them when we shut the grill off, but they only really seemed to retain the smokiness after they cooled off. (We left them on the grill to cool down.) They all definitely had a pronounced smoky scent, but the flavor of smoke varied a bit from type to type.
First up was our cold smoked kosher salts. The plain smoked one tasted and smelled somewhat stronger of smoke than the hot smoked plain version, which I'm not sure if that was due to the different surface area compared to the coarse sea salt or just being in the cold smoker box. (I'm not a particularly good scientist, and did a poor job with control groups.)
The lemon rosemary-spritzed version came out smelling oddly of fish, in a not particularly good way. This is the plain smoked kosher, which I quite liked.
The rosemary lemon flavored sea salt lost its green luster (I misted each of the flavored salts about half a dozen times over the first 12 hours of smoking), and actually lost much of the flavor we'd tasted when we turned the grill off as well. I re-misted it after it had cooled, which helped it regain a nice bite of citrus and rosemary. The alcohol evaporated off quickly enough that it didn't melt any of the salts, and I just let them air dry after misting. It turned out a pretty mild grey color at the end.
I also re-misted the orange flavored salts, as they too had lost a lot of their citrusy smell and flavor. I also decided to mix in a bit of dried orange zest for good measure and color. These turned the most colorful of all the salts, which I can only attribute to the orange extract, since they were right next to the other two flavored salts. The MAK crew voted this the best of the varieties I brought in for sampling.
For the plain sea salts that were hot smoked, the only major different between using the screen and flat griddle was the color the salts achieved. The screened salts had a more uniform grayish brown color, while the griddle variety were more brown than grey, with more lighter colors mixed in (as they didn't get as much smoke penetration around all sides). I decided to mix the two just to have a pretty little variety in my jars.
All in all was a hoot to try out all the varieties and see what worked and what didn't... Sure I'll mess around with it again and tweak a few things here and there, but it was a neat experiment! I even forgave Willis for waking me up before 8am on a weekend, and we all had a good snuggle. Another side effect of pellet smokers: because I smelled so deliciously like wood smoke (ie: food), James's golden, Roxy, has also decided that she counts as a lap dog.
