How to Smoke Your Own Salt, Peppers, and More

Smoke adds a rich, warm flavor to food that too often has been relegated to meat and cheese. In reality, we can cook lots of foods with smoke, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, tofu, and so on.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t often have a full day to devote to firing up the smoker, but we love the flavor imparted by doing so. Instead, we can smoke our seasonings such that we always have the option to add the flavor without the drama.

Smoking spices, particularly salt, is a great way to impart that alluring smoky flavor in everyday cooking. With smoked salt, we can add that unique flavor to our beans, spaghetti sauces, tofu scrambles, and all sorts of other favorites.

But, salt isn’t the only possibility, there are traditionally smoked pepper spices—think chipotle or paprika—as well as unusual versions like smoked jalapeño flakes. With these seasonings, it’s possible to put a touch of smoke in any recipe.

The General Concept of Smoking Food

Essentially, smoking food, plant-based included, involves cooking it with low heat for a long time. Nowadays, the options for how to do this are numerous. There are charcoal smokers, wood smokers, electric smokers, pellet smokers, and propane smokers. Each has some claim to being better than the others, but as with anything, personal preferences—speed, authenticity, space, versatility—make a difference.

All that said, it’s totally possible to smoke salt using indirect heat on a standard grill. The flavor might not be as intense as it would be with a proper smoker but smoked salt and peppers can still be on the menu without investing in a smoker right off the bat.

How to Smoke Salt

Source: Cooking Outdoors/Youtube

The most versatile smoked seasoning is salt. Kosher salt is generally considered a good choice for the base salt, but sea salt works very well, too. Coarse salts tend to be what the pros use.

The temperature range for smoking salt is vast, with cold-smoked salts staying around 100 degrees for hours and hours or hot smoked salts (at 200-plus degrees) taking only a couple of hours.

1. Soak whatever hardwood you want to use—apple, cherry, hickory, mesquite…-for an hour.
2. Heat up the pit in the meantime.
3. And, prepare the salt by putting water in a bowl, pouring the water away, and swirling the salt around in the moisture remaining in the bowl after doing this. The moisture will help the smoke stick to the salt.
4. Spread the salt over a splatter dish (the best option) or a pan/pie dish/aluminum foil.
5. Add the soaked wood chips (not the water) to the heat source and put the salt on the other side of the pit so that the smoke wafts over them but the heat is minimal.
6. Give a couple of hours (or more) to get the flavor. The salt will get a brownish, golden color.

How to Smoke Peppers

Source: Todd’s Kitchen/Youtube

Making smoked chili powders begins with choosing the right pepper. Paprika uses mild red peppers whereas we can make chipotle with ripe, red jalapeño peppers. We can also make smoky red pepper chili flakes or daringly hot seasoning like smoked habanero powder. It’s just a matter of taste.

1. Get the smoker set up with the desired wood and temperature (around 200 F).
2. Cut the peppers in half and take out the seeds.
3. Smoke the peppers for anywhere from 2 to quite a few hours.
4. Once the peppers have smoked, switch them over to a food dehydrator.
5. Dehydrate the peppers until they can be ground into a powder or crushed into flakes.

How to Make Liquid Smoke

Source: Ballistic BBQ/Youtube

A final way of adding smoke-flavoring to any dish at any time is to make liquid smoke, which is just a natural product that can be created when burning wood. Liquid smoke is concentrated condensation collected from smoke. A little goes a long way and is awesome for making barbecue sauces and smoky beans. This process is a bit more complicated—too involved for this article, so look at the video—but is totally doable for a motivated home chef.

And, like that, we can have smoke-flavoring in all our favorite dishes without having to fire up the grill or smoker every time. For some of us, that’s living the dream, or at least a dream of sorts.

Related Content:

• How to Make Homemade Herbal Salt
• Cooking with Cast Iron: Why You Should Keep Your Cookware Old School
• Which Salt Is the Best Salt?
• Tips for Cooking Quick Plant-Based Meals on the Campfire

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