Easily transform ordinary coarse salt into delicious smoky seasoning at home.
Using smoked salt is the perfect way to infuse some smoky flavor into your home-cooked meats or vegetables—even if you haven’t cooked them over fire. This cold-smoked recipe adds an incredible depth of flavor that far surpasses any store-bought seasoning, and is great for elevating pan-fried steaks, scrambled eggs, and even cocktails.
While I typically use my smoked salt to add a bit more flavor to traditionally “hot and fast” meats like steak, it’s great for having on hand for food I cook away from the grill or smoker. I’ve used it on vegetable dishes like asparagus, broccoli, and Padrón peppers, as well as in brownies and even on the rim of homemade margaritas.
I’ve always gone for cold smoking over hot for my home-smoked salt. While plenty of people succeed with hot smoking, I find hot smoked salt a bit too intense and brittle. And because hot smoking is about generating heat for cooking, there just isn’t much need to do it here. Cold smoking, on the other hand, is all about producing smoky flavor without cooking it, yielding a much more subtle flavor and maintaining its texture better. It takes a little longer, but the results make it well worth it.
If you’re new to cold smoking, a lot of the same principles as regular smoking remain, but instead of burning wood splits over coal, we’ll be using a tube smoker and pellets to generate our smoke.
Cold Smoking Explained
Cold smoking is a technique that infuses food with smoky flavor without actually cooking it, using smoke at low temperatures (typically 68-86°F/20-30°C). It’s perfect for adding flavor to ingredients like salt, mild cheeses, and fish.
What Type of Salt to Use
Go for coarse sea salt here. The larger crystals create more surface area, which means they take on smoke better to give you more flavor, and this larger size means they maintain their shape and texture better during the smoke. Plus, they just look better than regular table salt.
Storage
Store the salt in an airtight container, such as a glass mason jar with a sealed lid, in a cool dry cupboard or pantry for up to a year. Any kind of airtight container will work, but the priority is to keep out moisture and lock in the smoky flavor.
Quick Tips
- For my smoked salt, I just use oak pellets. It’s a pretty versatile wood type and, to be honest, I don’t find that there’s too much difference in flavor between types of pellets (e.g. cherry, maple, etc) when it comes to salt.
- Avoid stacking the salt in the foil tray, instead creating a thin, even layer to really maximise the surface area exposed to the smoke. Any salt flakes buried deep underneath won’t take on flavor, so use a second tray if you have to.
- Smoking it for 4 hours should give you the ideal level of smoky flavor, but if you do find the flavor overpowering, simply mix in some plain unsmoked salt to help mellow it out.
Smoked Salt
Equipment
- smoker tube
- smoker pellets (I used oak pellets but any flavor or aroma is fine)
- disposable aluminum tray
- heat gun or blow torch
- heat-proof gloves
- digital probe thermometer
- kettle grill or smoker
- mason jar
Ingredients
- 1 cup coarse sea salt
Instructions
- Cover the bottom of a disposable foil pan with coarse sea salt. Spread the salt evenly in a thin layer across the tray to ensure maximum smoke exposure.
- Fill a tube smoker with pellets. Use a heat torch to ignite the tube at one end. Leave to sit for 5 minutes to allow the pellets to ignite and generate a rolling smoke.
- Wearing heat-proof gloves, place the tube smoker on your grill or smoker’s grates. Place a thermometer probe on the smoker grates to measure the ambient temperature of your grill or smoker. Close the lid and allow it to come up to a temperature in the range of 68-86°F (20-30°C).
- Place the salt tray in your smoker, and leave to smoke for 3-4 hours, until the salt has developed a brown color. Stir the salt every hour to ensure the flakes are getting an even amount of coverage.
- Use immediately or store in an airtight mason jar in a cool, dark place for up to one year.
