articles, cheese

Smoking Food in Portugal

The Smoking Gun Food Smoker

I love my kitchen gadgets, and it’s something of a running joke with various family members that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find things I don’t have already.

At Christmas, my mother hit the jackpot, with a new gadget that’s found itself a place on my list of “best gifts ever.” Let me introduce to you the PolyScience Smoking Gun Food Smoker!

The Smoking Gun Food Smoker

The Smoking Gun Food Smoker

We have a bit of a fondness for smoked food, and our relatives in the Portuguese countryside have built various food smokers with good levels of success. However, I’m sure none of them would mind me saying that my new toy beats them all!

The food smoker arrived in Portugal last week. Unfortunately we weren’t able to bring it back from the UK straight after Christmas as we were already at our luggage limit, and I didn’t fancy cramming something gun-shaped into my hand luggage!

We decided to take the Smoking Gun over to our family’s house at the weekend, so that we could all have a play with it together.

The main plan was to do chicken wings and ribs, but we weren’t going to stop there. While the meat was cooking we smoked some olive oil, which was seriously delicious. We were introduced to smoked olive oil in Barcelona last year, and if it’s not something you’ve tried, please trust me when I say it’s something you need in your life.

Smoking olive oil in Portugal

Smoking olive oil in Portugal

We then smoked a couple of varieties of cheese, with great success, and my father-in-law blasted some smoke into some bourbon. As a non-whisky drinker, it still wasn’t to my taste, but he seemed delighted with the results.

The “Smoking Gun” is delighfully easy to use. You burn a tiny bit of woodchip in the smoking chamber, switch it on, and blast some smoke into a lidded container using a length of pipe. Generally the food only needs about 30 seconds sitting with the smoke to take on some serious smoke flavour. The best thing of all is that you can add dry herbs for extra flavour, and you really can taste the difference.

The Smoking Gun in Action

The Smoking Gun in Action

You also only need a tiny pinch of woodchips to smoke some food. The tiny pots provided will last us ages, but we are keen to try all the other flavours in the range.

After our small experiments, we moved onto the main event: smoked ribs with BBQ sauce and hickory smoke, and chicken wings with applewood smoke and smokey herbs. It was all just as good as it sounds!

A feast of smoked meat

A feast of smoked meat

I get through a lot of kitchen gadgets. Some get used once and never again, but I’m pleased to say the Smoking Gun is something I think we will use a lot. It’s so simple to use that adding a smokey flavour takes no more effort than grating a little pile of parmesan, and is therefore something we can do on a whim. I hope our future guests like smoked food, as I think we’re going to be serving a lot of it this year!

CYNICS PLEASE NOTE: The Smoking Gun was a genuine Christmas present, and Food and Wine Portugal wasn’t paid a single penny for this positive review!

You can find the smoking gun on Amazon UK, just use the link below:

Polyscience® – The Smoking Gun Promo Pack (Includes 5 x 500ml pots of wood chips)