What Kind of Meat is Best for Smoking?
When it comes to choosing the best meat for smoking, you’ll want to look for meat that has the same thickness and consistency throughout. Plus, you’ll also want to look for marbling which helps hold the smoke flavoring. Watch and learn as we share our favorite tips for choosing the best meat for smoking.
Video Transcription
What do I look for When Picking the Meat I would Like to Smoke?
Hey, this is Alfonso with North 40 Outfitters. And today I'm going to talk to you about meat selection for your smoking purposes. When it comes to smoking and meat selection, what I really look for is a piece of meat that has nice presentation on it. What I'm really looking for is some consistency throughout the piece of meat. So, I just want things to be the same thickness throughout. One other thing you want to look for is to make sure that your coloration in the meat is consistent all the way through.
What type of Meat Should I Select?
As far as meat selection, you've got all types of meat that you can choose out there. I personally like to do a lot of wild game, and pork seems to be very popular in my family. Steak is also pretty easy to do or any type of beef. One of the things I look for is a good fat taint or some marbling inside. That's just going to help you hold your smoke flavor much, much better. So you just need to have a good balance between over-thickness of fat and then just go in and provide some trimming, just based off of your estimation of how much fat is going to get to it. I find that fat does help the smoking process. It holds your spices a lot better, and it does hold your smoke flavor much better as well, also.
How do I Prepare Lean Meat for Smoking?
When you do run across some leaner pieces of meat, like game, for instance, I'll usually like to rub some oil on it first just to coat it. And then I'll finish with my spices on top of that. I just find that, A, that the crust is a little bit better if I add some oils to it and it helps me hold that moisture contents during the smoking process as well. But when it comes to smoking, what you really want to do is just consider that smoking is going to take a lot more time for you to get your final product. You just want to try to do the smoking process as low and slow as possible to really get that flavor out in your meats.If you have any questions about the smoking process, please feel free to visit any of our store locations or visit north40.com.