This weekend - with a posse of guests to feed - we tried out cold smoking with the new ProQ Cold Smoke Generator in our ProQ Excel food smoker. We were pleasantly surprised how much smoke this nifty little device created and it’s dead easy and really quick to set up and light. We smoked a lump of inexpensive medium flavour cheddar and a whole brie for about 6 hours and added these to our cheese board at the end of the evening. We didn’t use the full 100gm of oak wood dust which comes with the product as we went for a minimum cold smoke time of 6 hours rather than the full 12 hours which the cold smoke generator is capable of.

The results were fantastic! The cheddar in particular took on the full oak wood smoke flavour and it really was transformed into something a lot more interesting than the rather tasteless soapy cheddar we started with. The results for the brie were a lot more subtle and the smokey taste was concentrated in the outer layer - actually that tasted really great. To get the smoke flavour to run all the way through we should probably have cut the brie in half or made some holes through the outer skin.

All in all, we were all really impressed with the results of this new cold smoke generator and as it really needs so little set up we’re going to experiment some more with some new wood flavours we’ve just taken on - including apple and cherry dust. Could be interesting with a goats cheese or other hard cheese.

David at Hot Smoked.