Smoking Ingredients

Traditional Chinese smoking materials include hickory, camphor, and cypress woods, raw rice, peanut shells, black and jasmine tea leaves, brown sugar, and a host of specialty items ranging from pine needles to cassia bark to fruit peels. The wood and the sugar create the smoke by combusting, the rice comes into play by fueling the mixture, and the aromatics, including the wood, the tea, and the specialty spices, create the fragrance.

My standard home-smoking mixture is based on almost equal parts brown sugar, raw rice, and dry black tea leaves. The sugar may be light brown or dark brown or a combination of the two, the rice may be white or brown but preferably talc-free, and the tea is whatever my nose judges to best complement the food. I sometimes use perfumed Chinese teas—rose black and litchi black primarily, both too highly perfumed for me to drink with pleasure, but perfect as a scent for smoked chicken. Other times I use Western spice blends flavored with orange rind and cinnamon. Depending on mood and menu, I will enrich the mixture with Szechwan peppercorns, home-dried orange or tangerine peel, dried apple or peach skins, or crumbled cinnamon sticks or pieces of Chinese cassia bark. You may elaborate on the basic trio of rice, sugar, and tea as playfully as you like, so long as you use only dry ingredients and don’t overload the pot.