Soaking grill wood chips is a popular step in electric smoker preparation for many outdoor cooks. Is that just a myth about grilling or is there logic behind the approach? Here’s everything you need to know about soaking wood chips for grilling.
One of the best things about smoking with wood is the ability to pair your chosen meat with the perfect wood . When you know you’ve combined a strong wood like maple with a beautiful, slow-cooked meat like pork, then you know you’ve become the consummate master of barbecue smoking.
New to grilling? Learn how to use an electric smoker with our guide
But it may seem strange to you that many smoking recipes tell you to remove the wood chips before throwing them in the smoker. Then you wouldn’t expect the wet parts to catch fire, would you?
Despite this, it is well known that soaked wood chips help bring out the flavors of cured meats. But there is much debate about wet versus dry wood .
Conventional wisdom can be unreliable, however, so let’s see how it fares.
Earlier soaking of wood chips has become popular because it is believed to be a way to dampen the potentially high combustion temperatures of wood, while smoking is thought to be a grilling method that requires low temperatures to be maintained for long periods of time. Because electric smokers often have built-in temperature controls, removing wood chips isn’t really necessary.
However, removing wood chips can do a lot more than just regulate the temperature of your smoker. Let’s take a look at why YOU might not want to prep your fries for electric grilling.
Why do we remove wood chips?
With traditional charcoal smokers, removing wood chips is recommended to (literally) mitigate the risk of burning. Smoking is a culinary discipline that requires meat to be cured at lower temperatures over a long period of time. The idea is that moistening will help them last longer at a lower heat.
However, this is a controversial practice even for charcoal smokers. Some people might say it helps the chips produce more smoke, but mostly they alternate vapor with smoke. The increased water content in the fries evaporates, causing large amounts of steam to escape from the smoker.
While it helped get more smoke out of the smoker, there is also a risk of water dripping onto the hot coals in the smokehouse, which could cool or even extinguish them.
Conventional wisdom often dictates that soaked wood can contribute to more smoke, but personally I think this is related to the type of wood used. For example, oak and hickory are known to produce a lot of smoke.
Should you remove wood chips for electric smokers?
While electric smokers generally don’t require wood chips, many are designed to accommodate them. Not only are wood chips a source of fuel, they can also help enhance the flavors of the smoke, which can enhance the flavor of the meat.
If your electric smoker doesn’t have an obvious container for wood chips, you can avoid them by placing them in a metal can or aluminum foil and then carefully laying them around the bottom of your smokehouse.
You can also use a smoker box that is designed for good smoke extraction and longevity.
When it comes to stirring the fries, the truth is, it’s not strictly necessary. I love adding wood chips to an electric smoker to add more flavor. But like charcoal smoking, soaked or not, whenever YOU replace the chips every two to three hours anyway, so if the motivation is to improve the chips’ shelf life, then it doesn’t make much of a difference.
However, if you want to carry a bigger, richer flavor to the wood chips, this is a great option. Wood chips are often flavored anyway, in flavors like oak, hickory, and mesquite, but we can take this to an even stronger level by soaking them in liquids like beer, apple juice, or even wine.
However, it can be a balancing act. If YOU should be using a flavored wood, make sure the liquid you are using does not overpower the wood. YOU should also make sure that it is well supplemented.
Is there a reason not to remove wood chips?
I’ve discussed the importance of considering the flavor profiles you’re mixing. Another important consideration is the quality of smoke YOU want to produce from your smoker.
There are different types of smoke and not all are suitable for smoking meat. White smoke is often in the specified vapor, which is ineffective for most forms of cooking, while gray and black smoke are often dirty and rich in carcinogens.
What we really want to achieve is a very thin light blue smoke.
For this we need a lot of oxygen and dry wood, which we do not get with soaked wood.
In addition to all of the above, one of the great things about smoking meat is that it takes a less is more approach to cooking. It’s about being stripped back and nuanced. If we create too much smoke, it will overwhelm the meat and make it inedible. Added flavors from flavored chips, sheet, or wood chips are completely lost when you smoke overflow into the smokehouse.
final verdict
Whether or not you should remove wood chips before using your electric smoker depends largely on what flavors you’re after. If you want to modify your wood chips by soaking them in a liquid like apple juice, beer, or wine, this can be an easy approach.
However, if you’re considering just removing them in water, I wouldn’t bother. The temperature of electric smokers is easy to control, so you don’t have to try to mitigate the heat from wood chips.
Writer & content creator. BBQ fanatic!
