Smoking can be defined as the process of browning, flavoring, preserving, or cooking food by way of exposing it to some smoke from smoldering or burning material. This material is most often some kind of wood. Fish, meat, or even vegetables can be smoked to enhance the flavor of a variety of dishes.

In Europe, the traditional smoking wood is alder, although oak is also used frequently. Beech is used the least, but it is still prevalent. In North America, mesquite, hickory, pecan, oak, maple, alder as well as fruit-tree woods like cherry, plum, and apple are quite common for smoking. You can also use some other biomass besides wood. For instance, Chinese tea-smoking consists of a mixture of sugar, uncooked rice, and tea. All these ingredients are heated at a wok's base.

Some North American bacon and ham makers also smoke their products by using burning corncobs. Moreover, peat is burned in order to dry and smoke barley malt, which is then used to make some beers and whiskey. In New Zealand, the native manuka or tea tree is used to get sawdust, which is then used to hot smoke fish. Another interesting smoking tradition lies in Iceland, where they use dried sheep dung to cold smoke lamb, whale, mutton, and fish.

Historically, all kinds of farms in Western countries included a smokehouse in the form of a small building where meats were smoked as well as stored. This building was typically well-separated from any other building to avoid any danger of fire and also due to smoke emanations.

There are four main ways to smoke food - cold smoking, hot smoking, warm smoking as well as by using liquid smoke. These techniques of smoking affect only the surface of the food. Hence, you cannot use these approaches to preserve

food. If you wish to preserve food, you might have to pair smoking with some other microbial hurdles like packaging and chilling in order to extend the shelf life of food.

The origins of smoking food can be traced to the paleolithic era. As simple huts or caves lacked chimneys, these dwellings would become quite smoky. It is believed that early humans would often hang up their meat to dry so that they were not in the way of pests. Hence, accidentally, they deduced that meat that was kept in smoky places got a distinct flavor and also helped in preserving the meat better than simply drying it out.

Later, this process was paired with pre-curing food in salty brine or salt, which resulted in an effective preservation process. This process was developed and adapted by several cultures worldwide. Furthermore, until the modern era, the process of smoking was considered to be a "heavy-duty" thing to preserve food. In such a scenario, large quantities of salt were employed to cure meat and other food items. In the same vein, the smoking time was also rather long, and sometimes, it even involved several days of exposure.

It cannot be disputed that modern transportation has made it much simpler to transport food items over long distances. This has reduced the need for material-intensive smoking and heavy salting. With time, smoking has become a popular way of enhancing the flavor of food as well as preserving food items over a period of time.

Given the popularity of this method of cooking, this smoker cookbook is dedicated to sharing smoker beef recipes, smoker pork recipes, smoker poultry recipes, smoker seafood recipes, and smoker vegetable recipes with you that involve the component of smoking.

This cookbook will provide you:

• Smoker cookbook: Introduction
• Smoker Grill Cookbook: Smoking Meat Introduction
• BBQ Cookbook: Different Types Of Smokers Available
• Smoker cookbook: Different Types Of Woods Available
• Grilling Cookbook: Basic Preparations For Smoking Meat
• Smoker Grill Cookbook: Core Elements Of Smoking