Smoked cheese is mostly seen at high-end and local-end grocers stores, and it comes with a price tag. Luckily, if you’ve had Z Grills at home, you can easily recreate smoked cheese again with fantastic results. In addition, you get to have a lot of fun making your smoked cheese!
Ingredients and Tools You’ll Need to Smoke Cheese
Ingredients:
- Block cheese(s)
- Ice
Tools:
- An outdoor grill (Z Grills 11002B Pellet Grill With Wi-Fi)
- Wood Pellets
- Parchment Paper
What Kind of Cheese to Smoke?
The type of cheese to smoke depends on your personal preference and want. The most popular type of cheeses to smoke include cheddar and Mozzarella. However, If you try the following, you will have a great result and yummy taste: Monterey Jack, American, Brie, Gouda, Gruyere, and Swiss. If the cheese is too big, you will need to cut it into smaller pieces to allow the smoke to penetrate.
Smoked Cheese
To make the best-smoked cheese, start by getting Z Grills outdoor grill.
Well, when you want to smoke a more Light food product – one that easily melts at these temperatures, such as Smoked cheese? This is where cold smoking is set in motion. It’s a captivating notion since producing smoke requires fire, which equals a lot of heat. However, you can fill your cheese with smoky flavor with some simple instructions while using low heat.
Smoked cheeses are regarded as an exclusive delicacy and can cost a bit more than normal cheese. The beauty of smoking it yourself is that you can buy cheap grocery-store cheese and improve the taste by putting additional flavor to it with these methods. The best way of having a tasty smoked cheese is by using a Z grills pellet grill for cooking the cheese.
Despite the method used for smoking the cheese, the key is to keep the temperature lower than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The cheese will not liquefy at this temperature, and to protect your cheese from an unexpected heat explosion, general settings include grate cooking settings or cake cooling racks on aluminum cans full of ice. The cheese will sit on the grate or cooling rack, and the smoke will roll around the cheese. The tin of ice will provide a buffer for any high heat that might travel over to your tender cheese.
What Temperature to Smoke Cheese?
In most cases, smoking involves heating, with the most common temperatures ranging from 180 to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
How to Smoke Cheese on a Pellet Grill
Here are 6 quick and easy tips to help you smoke the best cheese.
1. Set up the grill and allow it to warm up.
2. Put some quantity of wood chips that fills the hand on top. It helps to create an area on the grill where you can easily add more wood pellets. Place an aluminum full of ice within the grill, with the cheese and grate far from the heat source. A Pellet grill smoker is larger and will allow you to have a greater distance between the cheese and the heat source. The most important thing is not allowing the temperature to exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. After the pellet is lit and the wood chips are placed on top, quickly assemble your cheeses and aluminum tin on the grate. Create enough space between the cheese for the smoke to penetrate and travel through the cheese.
4. Next, close the dome of the grill immediately and allow it to smoke. If the smoke dies down after about twenty to thirty minutes, add another handful of wood and charcoal briquettes. This should give you another thirty minutes of cold smoking. Systems are different, so if you need to add some more pellets, that’s fine. Suppose five coals are too much; back it down to two or three. The time for smoking depends on you; it all about a personal decision. If you want a smoky cheese, you might want three hours. If you want a normal amount of smoke, you can keep it to two hours.
5. Once it is halfway done, rotate the cheeses on the grate (moving front to back and flipping the cheese blocks.
6. Once it is done, you can use your spatula to remove the cheese from the grate.
How to Store Smoked Cheese?
Now comes the important aspect. Once your cheese is done smoking, separate it from the grate and wrap it in the paper. It needs to rest for a little bit and put it in your fridge for two days. Next, please remove it from the paper or nylon and vacuum seal your cheese.
If you don’t have a sealer, place it in a zip bag and try to extract as much air as you can. You can do this by putting the cheese in a bag of water, leaving the top seal above the water. The water will force out a lot of the air when the zip top is underwater, and seal it tightly (don’t let the water enter the bag). Now, date those cheeses, so you don’t forget which cheese is in which bag.
Place the sealed bags in the fridge and wait for two weeks. If you taste some of your cheese right after smoking, it will taste smoky and bitter. This occurs because the smoke is heavy on the outside of the cheese. As it sits in the fridge, that smoky flavor will move all through the cheese and chill out.
After two weeks, your cheese will be lovely and ready to be chewed on as is, melt onto a glorious cheeseburger or mix into Mac and Cheese. Enjoy!
