What’s To Eat: Smoked Eggplant Dip, Smoked Tomato Vinaigrette
I love smoke. I recently did a little bit of “drive-by” smoking and made a Smoked Eggplant Dip (eggplant and smoke are a match made in heaven) and a Smoked Tomato Vinaigrette. Recipes and pictures after the break.
What’s To Eat: Smoking
I like to smoke… food. We had a Pete and Jen’s Backyard Birds capon in the freezer and smoking it seemed like a good thing. In general, I like to smoke the breast and dark meat separately. There are any number of decent rubs available so I dug out the Rufus Teague for the dark meat and the BT’s Smokehouse for the white. By the way, BT’s Smokehouse is one of the best BBQ places in New England.
I had some shrimp that I’d just bought so I smoked them too. Honestly, I don’t like smoked shrimp as much as I like them sauteed with some sort of rub or sauce, like jerk.
I wish I had a real smoker, like a Weber “Bullet”, but instead I just use a vanilla Weber kettle, stack the coals on one side, put my wood hunks on top, put the food on the other side, and the vent opposite the coals. It works well enough although admittedly the smoke and heat distribution is not ideal. My wood of preference is hickory. Nothing really beats that hickory flavor and aroma.
Oh, did I mention I smoked some bluefish with the shrimp?
The capon after smoking. In general, the skin is rubbery when it gets smoked, but the meat is nice and moist.
The breast meat. Not a lot of smoke ring, but a suitable amount of smoke flavor.
And the shrimp…
