Thanks, you two. Good knowledge.
I love a smokey flaour too, just in the right place.
Cooking in my oven indoors I find, if I'm adding any sort of marinade or rub, I can get a pretty good smokey flavour using a good quality smoked paprika. I cooked pork yesterday, and I think there was more smoke from the paprika than from the wood chips I used.
As I say, I'm very cautious with smoking chicken; it has to have the quality of a very mild ingredient.
Unfortunately, it's often impossible to not overpower everything else due to the smoke's penetration; smoke appears to go right through a chicken's flesh far more easily than it does with other meat. If you put a barbecue sauce, or a rub or marinade on the outside of the chicken, the flavour stays there, or only penetrates the very outside of the chicken. But I tend to find that the smoke penetrates all of the chicken flesh. This means that any chicken you eat without the skin or outside layer just tastes of smoke, rather than the rub/marinade/sauce.
So, skin aside, you just get plain smoked chicken, which I don't find to be all that pleasant. Neither do most people, it would appear - just look at the balance of smoked to chicken to other flavours on the shelves in the supermarket. Most people have had smoked chicken and smokey bacon. They continue buying smokey bacon (delicious), but 95% of the population avoid smoked chicken like the plague. It's pretty similar with cheese (smoked cheese must account for less than 1% of overall cheese sales), and to a lesser extent with fish (a few smoked fish products, but far fewer than non-smoked).
That's not without reason: chicken (and most other foods) and smoke are simply not complimentary flavours to most taste buds. It always puzzles me that there would appear to be a huge coincidence happening. People who like to cook outdoors and buy a barbecue, what do you know, they nearly all like all of their food smoked.
Sorry, I've gone off on one again, haven't I.
Steve W
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