Food Safari

Amongst the world's cuisines,

smoke is a cooking method,

a mysterious subtle flavour and a preservative.

From the earliest days of fire,

smoke was found to have special properties.

Meat could be cured and last for so much longer.

Now, smoking is all about flavour and texture.

Welcome to Food Safari Fire,

and the delicious and ancient art of smoking.

In this episode of Food Safari Fire,

hot-smoked fish, and how West Africans make use of it.

Turkish-inspired smoked lamb,

Irish-style bacon,

Chinese tea-smoked duck

and the recipe every hipster in town is lining up for -

USA-style pork ribs.

Smoking -

it's one of the first preserving methods known.

That's what it was about in early days.

Now we do it for pleasure,

and you can create just wonderful flavours.

On the far New South Wales south coast,

Stan Soroka owns and runs the Eden Smokehouse.

His award-winning hot-smoked fish

starts with local as well as Tasmanian fish,

some basic equipment and a good supply of woodchips.

It's not super high-tech.

We have the top hopper loaded with woodchips.

It'll drop a certain amount of woodchips on the hotplate.

We don't want to set fire to the woodchips.

So it's a gentle heat that just... A gentle heat.

It's like a red wine. We want something nice and smooth.

Oh, isn't that beautiful?!

Stan's lifelong passion for smoking started with his Polish parents.

We were making our own sausages, our own hams.

So I've been surrounded

with all this wonderful preserving techniques.

How fabulous. But the flavours!

Yellowtail kingfish -

was just caught this morning out of our pristine oceans around here.

The fillet I've got here has already been brined.

We use one part salt, half part sugar and five parts water.

How long does the fillet need to stay in the brine?

About an hour in the brine and then you wash it all off.

What we're going to do now

is use some paper towelling and dry the fillet out.

If you don't dry it out, the smoke just runs off the fillet.

Now this smoker uses methylated spirits as the source of the heat.

We want about 45 to 50 minutes to smoke and cook this,

so we're just going to half-fill both of them.

The woodchips you see here is European oak.

We need approximately a heaped tablespoon.

We don't want to put too much in.

If you put too much in, it just gives you an acrid flavour.

We now put the tray on top of this.

We place this on top of the burners,

we put our racking in.

It's a beautiful looking fish, Stan. It is.

Always skin down. Mmm.

Now we put the lid on it and wait for about an hour.

Now you notice on top of the smoker there's a small hole? Ah, yes.

It's very important to get the smoke to come out.

We don't want that smoke to stay in there and get rancid.

The actual smoking process will only be about 15, 20 minutes.

That'll burn out and all we do then is we cook the fish.

Let's have a look, shall we?

You can see... Oh, look at that!

The colour looks great too.

Now, the great moment of...

OK. I'll let you decide.

Mmm!

That's beautifully smoky.

It's so tender too. It's moist.

There isn't too much smoke.

It's fresh and it's smoky at the same time.

And it's addictive.

You take one bite and you want more and more and more. Right.

Across West Africa,

smoked fish is flaked into stews, ground into powder and used whole.

It's entwined with tradition, history and religion.

It occupies a very, very special place.

What I do here encompasses smoking, roasting, steaming and drying.

All in this one big, dark room. Yes.

Here you go.

Nigerian born Kunle Adesua continues this ancient tradition

on a much bigger scale,

smoking Australian fish with long-burning red gum

in his Melbourne smokehouse.

And does that give a special flavour to the fish, the type of wood?

Oh, yeah, it give that nice smoky, aromatic flavour.

Kunle leaves the fish to smoke

for a period between a couple of weeks and a couple of months.

So it's a secret, dark world in there.

Yes.

When it's completely dried out and its flavour intensified,

it can be kept for years.

This one was made, like, five years ago.

This is five years old?

Yes, just mature, like wine. Mmm.

The dried fish is used

to make a range of West African-inspired foods

for Kunle's company, Tribal Tastes,

including the beloved West African condiment, shitto.

It goes on anything.

You can actually use it

as a flavour enhancer in your cooking - take it to the next level.

This is a dried chilli, and we have the green chillies too.

Hot chilli powder, which goes in.

Himalayan salt.

These are Australian school prawns, which are just dried, not smoked.

And then intricately smoked fish.

This is African cooking.

It's an art that is passed on

from generation to generation intuitively.

So it's quite frothy, almost. Yeah, yeah.

You can use this on your pasta

instead of parmesan cheese, or things like that.

This oil is liquid gold,

which is the 100% pure palm fruit oil.

It's extracted from the fruit of the palm fruit,

not from the kernel.

To the hot oil, Kunle adds chopped celery, parsley,

spring onions, roasted red capsicum,

tomato puree and chopped onion.

So we need all these vegetables

to create a very moist and juicy environment.

And this fish will just blend into it.

So we have to cover it and then let it cook.

Kunle, three hours later, it looks amazing.

Yeah. It's this beautiful dark mass, isn't it?

Yes. It's ready to be bottled now.

Let's have a try, shall we?

You...you don't need much of this.

A very, very little goes a long way.

Mmm.

Oh, it's a deep, rich flavour, isn't it?

Yeah. I think it's great. Mmm!

Perfect.

Yeah, it's delicious. Mmm!

Smoking is a truly transformative process.

Smoke contains nitrates,

which start a chemical reaction in any sort of protein.

They help break down the connective tissues

and add a really lovely, naturally sweet flavour to meat.

The way barbecue started in the United States

is the fact that the farmer, or the producer,

would always get the best cuts of the meat

and then the secondary cuts

would always be handed down to the farm workers.

They would take the secondary cuts,

they would put it over a low heat, cook it for a long period of time

and actually it would taste better than what the farm owner would have

because they would cook theirs hot and fast.

Kansas City Barbecue Society pitmaster Jim Johnson

is an expert at letting the smoke do the work.

For us, smoking is low and slow.

After an illustrious 26 years

cooking on the Kansas City barbecue circuit,

Jim has retired from competing

to focus on educating barbecue enthusiasts around the world.

I think that's going to be great. Mwah!

Barbecue competitions are hugely popular in the US

and it all starts with some specific cuts.

So if you can, what we call in the US, a St Louis-style cut.

He's cutting the brisket off right now.

Once you cut that off, this becomes a squared up rib.

This becomes a St Louis-style cut.

This is a very popular cut in the US

and then they will actually cut the fat cap off.

There we go.

Excellent ribs to cook, backyard or competition.

What we're going to do is, is we're going to make a quick dry rub.

It will cause what we call a 'bark'.

So we're going to start with just a little bit of cayenne pepper.

We're going to add a little chilli powder to this.

Celery. Celery seed enhances the tastebuds.

We're gonna have a little bit of ground mustard, garlic powder.

What I have here is a spicy paprika,

and then I'm going to have a mild paprika.

Brown sugar for sweetness.

And then we're going to add just a little bit

of the regular white refined sugar.

And we're going to mix all this together.

So this enhances the flavour of the meat but doesn't overpower it. Doesn't overpower it.

And then what we're going to do is, is we're going to take olive oil.

So we're just going to put a little bit on. You don't have to have much.

And what I like to do is I start on the backside of the meat first

and I add some dry rub.

I rub that in, and I go all the way around

so that no side is unprotected.

So they're generous amounts you're putting on. Very much.

Because we want to make sure that the skin has a really good bite to it.

Now, we're going to be ready to take this to the smoker and put it on the fire.

Tell me the device and how you manage temperature and smoke.

You always have to have some sort of fuel to fuel the fire

and that's air.

So we have to have a fuel source - so we have to have air coming in.

Depending on the amount I open and close it,

is gonna depend on the fluctuation in the temperature.

So you have to have two air flows - one coming in and one going out.