Do you know someone who’s aspiring to become a chef? If you do and you want to keep tasty meals coming to you, give them a present.
Becoming a chef takes blood, sweat, and tears, as well as an excellent knowledge of secret ingredients. If you have no idea what to give, smoked salt and smoked spices can be your best choice!
Smoked Salt
Salt is one of the essential ingredients in the kitchen. Plenty of savory dishes make use of salt through grilling, baking, barbecuing, curing, and finishing. However, not all have discovered how salts can be a little more extra. A dish could gain some aroma and complexity through a secret ingredient called smoked salt.
Smoked salt is perfect for enhancing the salinity of any dish. This ingredient is ideal for meat eaters out there who want to beef up barbecues or for vegans looking for flame-grilled flavors to their meals. Smoked salt can be made out of different types of barks. The types of wood used for smoking salt can also impact its flavor.
Listed below are three of the most commonly used smoked salt.
- Smoked Alderwood Salt
Slowly smoked salt over a red alder wood is called smoked alder wood salt. This is a perfect way to add a beautifully smoked flavor to many dishes naturally.
- Smoked Hickory Salt
Smoked hickory salt is a salt that’s cold-smoked with hickory wood. It imparts a savory and sweet flavor, giving off a smoky and robust taste.
- Smoked Applewood Salt
Smoked applewood salt gives out a scrumptious sweet, woody, and fruity flavor to any dish. This is because this smoked salt is cold-smoked with sweet applewood, making it a lot delicate.
There are still plenty of smoked salts to try. Once you or your friends try them, you’ll wonder how you lived without them in the first place.
Smoked Spices
Spices can add complex and bright flavors to your favorite recipe. Most spices also have health benefits, making them a must-have in your kitchen. For the record, many chefs have already been making a living out of adding spices with cooking for ages.
To allow more flavor to infuse in the food, that’s when spices are to be used. At the same time, others use them as a garnish or only for presentation.
To help an aspiring chef establish an even more flavorful dish and gain greater confidence in cooking, here’s a list of spices that work efficiently when smoked.
- Smoked Allspice
Allspice is a powerful, fragrant, and sweet spice that tastes like a mix of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. It is believed to help fight against prostate and other forms of cancer. If your aspiring chef plans to make use of smoked allspice, try Caribbean jerk dishes. Add the smoked allspice to curries and chili as well. And if you want to add it to desserts, try cakes and puddings.
- Smoked Paprika
Trying out smoked paprika on a dish gives a rich, pronounced heat, and a smoky flavor. It is made with roasted and ground types of bell or chili peppers. It’s also believed that if you use it while it’s hot, you’ll be in luck. This is because paprika consists of capsaicin that gives off heat. It serves as an antioxidant that may help the cells of your body fight against damage. It can be tried on soups, stews, salsas, tomato sauces, or rice dishes to give out a complex and smoky flavor.
- Smoked Celery Seed
Smoked celery seed makes dishes taste slightly bitter, making it a more concentrated form of the celery itself. It is believed to be healthy because it perks up a low-sodium food flavor, making you use less salt. Aside from that, celery seed also has calcium and iron. When you use it, it’s highly suggested to sprinkle such seeds on steaks before cooking. You may also add them to soups, burgers, rubs, marinades, stews, and meatloaf.
Aside from the abovementioned kinds, there are still more smoked spices that also give out a satisfying taste to your favorite dish. The spices listed below could also work well in creating a mouthwatering flavor to your dishes through smoking.
- Pasilla pepper
- Chili powder
- Guajillo pepper
- Cinnamon powder
- Coriander seed
- Mustard powder
- Nutmeg powder
- Onion powder
For brines and marinades, smoked spices are highly efficient because solvents like water, fats, and alcohol significantly dissolve and unlock tasty flavors, which could accentuate their taste. The low and slow smoking process of food gives spices the luxury of time for absorption and dissolution, making this process the optimum cooking method.
Wrapping Up
The aspiring chef you wanted to give a gift to will eventually look for something that will significantly change a dish’s flavor. In that case, they might call for smoked spices or smoked salts they don’t have. Therefore, point out and select the best-smoked spices and smoked salts you could find as a gift. You’ll never know, but that aspiring chef could become successful because of this gift you’re about to give.
