Cold Smoking Protein Before Sous Vide

marchocais

I purchased a smoke gun recently and was thinking of using it to smoke the turkey this year as part of the sous vide turkey process, curious if anyone has experience with trying this on proteins before a long (12hr) sous vide?

Brandon_Byrd_40557

The Smoking Gun is useful as a finishing step on animal protein but it's not really a substitute for cold smoking. Butter and cheese will uptake smoke from the smoking gun very quickly and it will permeate the food, but it's more of a surface treatment for poultry, pork, lamb, and beef. (Fish is somewhat in-between). For actual cold smoking, I use a cheap and cheerful A-Maze-N tube smoker and wood pellets to generate smoke. It looks like that brand was bought by Pitboss Grills. Anyway, they're like $25 and you can fill them with whatever type of wood pellet you like. They generate smoke but basically no heat so you can use them to cold smoke items. You can also use them to add smoke capabilities to grills or whatever for hot smoking.

Cold smoking before sous vide definitely works, but it works best if you do it for an hour or two with circulating fresh smoke. The flavor develops in the bag. Pre-smoked items come out darker than when they went in. You'll also lose some smoke flavor to the bath, as smoke particles are small enough to penetrate through the plastic SV bags are made from. You might think you've sprung a leak, but it's just the smoke leeching out a bit.