Smoke woods

Smoke is what gives the meat that unmistakable BBQ flavour. Keep in mind most woods give up nearly everything they have in the first couple of hours.

The chart puts each wood where its character usually works best against each meat, but it is all subjective, and nothing on here will ruin a chicken.

Pear · Päron. The softest of the lot. Honeyed and faintly floral, and so gentle that on beef you will wonder whether you lit it at all. It shines best with poultry and pork loin.

Apple · Äpple. Sweet, mild, faintly fruity, and slow: apple takes hours to say anything, which makes it hard to overdo and the right first wood to learn on. Classic under pork shoulder, ham and whole birds.

Peach · Persika. Apple with a little more edge: the same fruit sweetness with a tang behind it. Good on poultry and pork, and one of the few fruitwoods with enough backbone for lamb.

Maple · Lönn. Distinctly sweet, almost syrupy, and mild with it. It suits everything sugar suits: poultry, pork, root vegetables, cheese. Pairs well with a heavier wood when you want sweetness without giving up depth.

Cherry · Körsbär. Sweet and slightly tart, and the one wood that changes how the food looks: it turns a surface deep mahogany, which is why competition cooks reach for it. Strong enough to be noticed on beef, kind enough not to bully a chicken. Blends with oak or hickory better than any other wood here.

Alder · Al. Delicate and clean, with just enough sweetness to sit among the fruitwoods. That is why it is the traditional Nordic fish wood, and why salmon over alder and salmon over apple taste like cousins. On red meat it largely disappears.

Beech · Bok. The Nordic smoking wood, and what Swedish smokehouses have run on for as long as there have been Swedish smokehouses. Very mild, very clean and close to neutral, with a faint sweetness underneath. It seasons without arguing, which is why it suits fish, sausage and cheese, and why it is the wood to reach for when you want the smoke to be a background note rather than the point.

Oak · Ek. The all-rounder, and the wood to reach for when you are not sure. Medium smoke, clean and earthy with no sharp edges, and it behaves the same at hour one and hour eight. Beef and lamb are its home. Staves from a whisky or wine barrel bring a little vanilla with them.

Hickory. Strong, savoury and unmistakably bacon-like: the taste most people mean when they say barbecue. Pork ribs and shoulder are what it is for. It is also the easiest wood on this chart to overdo: too much turns sour and faintly bitter, and no amount of resting takes it back out. There is no Swedish name because there is no Swedish tree.

Pecan · Pekan. Hickory’s gentler cousin, from the same family and with the same savoury direction, but softer, sweeter and distinctly nutty. It gives you most of what hickory gives without hickory’s habit of tipping over into bitter, which makes it the better choice for a long cook you are not going to stand over. Pork and poultry, and hard to beat on a whole turkey.

Whisky-barrel oak. Oak that has spent years holding whisky, and it brings some of that along: the clean earthy backbone of oak with vanilla and caramel over it, and a little sweetness from the char inside the stave. Stronger than plain oak, because the barrel adds rather than replaces. Beef and lamb, and very good under anything you mean to glaze. Wine-barrel staves do the same trick in a fruitier direction.

Mesquite. The strongest thing here by a distance: sharp, earthy and almost tarry if you let it run. It belongs to short, hot cooks (a Texas steak or a spatchcocked bird), not to a twelve-hour brisket, where it turns acrid long before the meat is done. Use it as a few chunks among oak rather than on its own.

Chips or chunks? Chips are thin, catch almost immediately and are spent in twenty or thirty minutes, so they suit short cooks and gas grills, where you want smoke now and will not be there to top it up. Chunks are fist-sized, smoulder for an hour or two, and go in with the charcoal at the start. That is what you want for anything low and slow, because the lid stays shut and every opening costs you twenty minutes.

Soaking chips is the most repeated piece of advice about them and it does very little: water does not penetrate more than a millimetre or two, so a soaked chip steams until it is dry and then burns exactly as it would have. What it does do is drop your temperature while it steams. If you want smoke for longer, use more wood, or bigger.

How much is enough? Two or three chunks under a shoulder, one or two under a chicken. Thin blue smoke you can barely see is what you are after; thick white smoke means the wood is smouldering without enough air and is depositing exactly the compounds that taste bitter. If you can smell it sharply from across the garden, there is too much of it.