How to use wood chips for epic bbq flavor!

[Music] how you doing everybody daniel maznett here with cowboy charcoal and today we're talking wood chips specifically we're talking about cowboy wood chips and how to add another layer of flavor to your barbecue whether you're barbecuing over coals or whether you're barbecuing over a grill wood chips can be an absolute lifesaver for your favorite recipes now a couple of things about wood chips all they are literally is wood that we have chipped up and put through a wood chipper okay this here is pecan wood which is one of my favorites it has a nice subtle flavor it's easy to smoke with it can work with just about any protein or any vegetable that you want to cook just to add a little bit more depth of flavor so we take our wood chips we cut them up we dry them to about five to eight percent of moisture so almost all the moisture in the wood is gone so all you're left with is that beautiful smoke for your beautiful smoke flavor okay so with pecan chips to get started with wood chips you don't need any fancy gadgets to start using wood chips you can go with something as simple as just a foil boat where you just put the wood chips right in the top of the boat if you don't want to make it look like a boat you can just take a handful of wood chips and that's about all you need for smoking for an hour or so or even less you can just put them right on the foil and you can just cover them up just like that i like to leave a little bit off of oxygen so you can poke a couple holes right in the top to let that smoke get out if you have a reusable metal tray that's the most environmentally conscious because you can use it over and over you just take your chips and you put them right in the top and if you'll know the trays that i'm using both the foil tray that you can pick up at any retailer or the metal trays they have some holes in the bottom and you can see the holes in the bottom here allow for the heat and the flame from your barbecue to get up into the chips and it helps you smoke that much faster so this as you can see is one of the trays that i've used quite a few times on the gas grill right behind me and i just put a handful right inside and for a gas grill that we're going to put on right now we're just going to take this and we're going to put it over the flames in the hottest part of the grill right now we're at about 350 degrees i've got a couple of burners going and we're just gonna set it right there over the hottest part of the grill for about five minutes or so until we see the smoke starting to come up for now we're gonna close the top and let that come up to temperature here i have a charcoal grill and now a lot of people say well you don't use wood chips for charcoal of course you can if you just want to add another little hit of flavor especially if you're cooking something quickly like pork chops or vegetables you can use a little bit of pecan and all you have to do is put them right over the top just a handful right on top of the coals and they'll start smoking and burning pretty quickly okay now you can see that these have really flamed up a little bit and this is all about air control right so if you want to close your vents down simply just close the top and we're going to close the air vent and we're going to reduce the amount of air that's getting into the fire that's the main thing you want to worry about when you're working with live fire is how much fuel you have and how much oxygen you're giving your fire so you can see now that a lot of our fire has died down and we're getting all of that nice clean smoke that is ready for our food so wood chips will last as hot as your fire is so this is a pretty hot charcoal fire i'm just going to add the wood chips right at the very end of what i'm cooking just to get that last little bit of smoke if we're cooking steaks these work perfectly if we have a cook that's going a little bit longer you might want to use wood chunks because they'll have a little bit more lasting power they're a little bit bigger they're physically bigger size so you want to use chunks for a longer smoke you can use wood chips for a bit of a shorter smoke and if you want to have a little bit more smoke you can just put a few more right on the top and now we get our smoke back and that's a nice smoke right at the end of our cook now coming back to the gas grill you can see this has been going for about three minutes or so and we're just starting to get a little bit of movement and a little bit of heat into our smoker basket so we're going to let this go for just a couple of more minutes and we'll see a little bit more smoke coming out what we love about wood chips is the versatility you can see all the smoke that we're getting from these wood chips on this briquette grill and in just a couple of minutes you're going to see the smoke that we can already see a little bit but you'll see the smoke that we're getting from the gas grill wood chips are extremely versatile you can take your normal everyday gas grill and remember propane is a fuel not a flavor you can take your everyday gas grill and turn that into a wood smoker with just a very simple basket of wood chips you can change the wood chip flavors out very easily we have different flavors from hickory pecan cherry apple and mesquite for any of the styles that you're cooking so make sure that the next time you fire up the gas on your gas grill you put on a basket of wood chips typically wood chips will take anywhere from four to seven minutes to start smoking depending on what portion of the grill you put your wood chips i recommend putting over the hottest part of your grill and turning that grill to high so you maintain as much heat as you can to keep that smoke going now remember we never soak our wood chips if you soak wood chips all you're doing is delaying the amount of time between when you put your wood chips on the grill and when they're ready to smoke see in order to start smoking all of that water that you've just soaked those wood chips in has to evaporate now one thing that you can do is you can soak your wood chips in things like whiskey or orange juice to allow a little bit more flavor to come out into your barbecue but we never soak our wood chips in water okay it's been about five minutes and we can just start to see a little bit of the smoke starting to pop out of the wood chip box that's really as long as it takes i've closed down the top of my briquette grill and you can see how much smoke that's producing just by putting on a couple of handfuls of wood chips and you can see the chips are right on the top providing all of that great smoke and that's excellent smoke for a gas grill or for a charcoal grill that means you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on a pellet smoker you can utilize the grills that you have already in your backyard to get all of that great smoked flavor into your barbecue so one question that we receive all the time is how long do wood chips last well you can see i have two very different applications and they've lasted very different amounts of time when i put the wood chips directly on the coals to get wood smoke they immediately start to smoke and they last about 15 to 20 minutes when i've put wood chips on my gas grill it takes a little bit longer to get smoke in a little bit longer to get started and they will last a little bit longer as well the other thing that you have to take into consideration is what type of vessel you're using when you're using wood chips if you use a foil boat like this with no holes on the bottom it'll take longer to smoke therefore extending the life of your wood chips if you use a foil tray that has holes on the bottom you can see them start smoking a lot faster and you'll burn through them a little bit more quickly as well typically a handful of wood chips will last you one cook of about an hour to an hour and a half another question that we get is what to do if the wood chips catch on fire well you're dealing with wood and fire so the likelihood of them catching fire is pretty high and it's very simple slowly and calmly that's the main word calmly take your wood chips and slide them away from the fire and then close the top to smother any fire that you have going on inside once your wood chips have stopped flaming you just move them right back to the hottest part of the grill and let them continue to smoke putting wood chips on your gas grill is the easiest way to get great smoke flavor into your barbecue and something that you can do tonight wood chips are relatively inexpensive and you can typically get four to six uses out of each bag so what do you do if you have more wood chips left in your bag simply take your bag fold down the top and top them with a chip clip now you know exactly how to use wood chips either on a charcoal grill or a gas grill for more tips and recipes and easy techniques make sure to like follow and subscribe to this channel and so many more we've got great recipes that we want to share and we want to hear from you so please reach out ask us any questions that we have and we'll make sure that we answer them just as quickly as we can i'm daniel maznet with cowboy charcoal and until next week keep cooking with cowboy [Music] you

Channel: Cowboy Charcoal

Views: 86,954

Keywords: wood chips, how to use wood chips, how to smoke with wood chips, how to use wood chips on a gas grill, how to use wood chips on grill, how to use wood chips for smoke flavor, what are wood chips, wood chips for bbq, how to get smoke flavor on a gas grill, cowboy charcoal, how to bbq

Id: hFKTdsPbaRo

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022