How to Smoke Food on the Grill

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:32


CURTIS STONE: I’m Curtis Stone, and this next GMC Trade Secret is smokin’. I’m going to show you how to smoke in your own grill at home.

Okay, now, it’s really simple. What you do is you get yourself some chips, some wood chips. These are mesquite. You could also use hickory. Now, you hear all sorts of stories. Some people smoke them in bourbon. Some people smoke them in beer. I don’t want to try any of that. I don’t know about alcohol and flames. So I’m just going to soak them in water for now.

Now, what you do is you soak them for about an hour. Okay, you pick them up and you just shake a little bit of that excess water off and throw them onto a – this is a broiler pan that I got at a grocery store. If you haven’t got one of those, get some aluminum foil and you just want to pick up your chips and throw them right there in the middle, because what we’re going to do is we’re going to put these underneath the grill, directly on the flame or directly over the heat source, and they’re going to just start to slowly smolder. So the reason that they get soaked is because that just slows down that smoldering process, so you get a really nice, slow smoke out of it.

What you do is you fold this up into a little parcel, okay. And once you’ve got that parcel done, grab a fork and just prick some holes in it; not too many. That’s just so that the flame can get in and that the smoke can get out, which is, of course, what we want. Beautiful.

So you take your parcel or your broiler ban, whatever it is that you have at home, turn your grill on quite high. You want it to sort of get the heat up there a little bit. And then you just stick this straight onto the heat source. So what I’ve done is I’ve removed – hear that little bit of moisture? Perfect. What I’ve done is removed the grill. So we replace that. So underneath our grill is our wood chips, which are just going to give off that nice, smoky flavor.

Okay, once they start to smolder, what you do then is you turn your barbecue right back. You turn it right down to low, so you just get a nice, slow smolder. And you can just adjust it, so you’ve just always got this little waft of smoke coming out of them. It takes about five minutes to get it going.

Okay, so our grill’s been going for about five minutes with the wood chips on. We have smoke. Lovely. Now, if you wanted to cook something on a hot temperature, you’d just cook it down at this end, away from where the smoke is. You’d grill burgers or sausages or whatever it was. You just want a little hint of smokiness. If you wanted to cook ribs or something like that that was going to take an hour or so, then you turn it right down. You want it about 200 degrees in there.

Our grill is now smoky and ready. I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s my GMC Trade Secret.