Hey, welcome back to How to Barbecue, right? Today I'm going to be cold smoking some cheese. Now, in the cold smoking process, we're not using any heat. We're just burning some wood smoke real low to add flavor to the cheese that we're going to have on the grill. Now, you can see I've got several different types of cheese. You can use whatever kind you want. I've got some less expensive blocks that I just got some from grocery store. Then, I've got some that cost a little more. And it's whatever flavor cheese you want as long as it has a higher melting point. And that's um pretty much the the only trick with cold smoking cheese is you don't want to use something that's going to melt. Now, for the cold smoking process, um you need you can do it on pretty much any kind of grill or smoker that you have as long as you can keep those temps down. Today, I'm using my Yodor, but I've got a pretty cool product that um I'm trying out. This it's called an amazing smoke tube. Now, I'm not going to turn my Yodar on. I'm not going to build a fire in the Yodar at all. The only fire I'm going to have is from these pellets that go in this tube. You can check them out. These are just regular Apple Barbecuers Delight pellets that I filled the tube with. And you light this tube and you put it in the bottom of your smoker or grill. Just away from the furthest away from the cheese that you're going to have on there, whatever else you're coal smoking, whether it's salmon or making jerky, whatever you're doing. But you want to keep the smoke away from it because it does produce some heat and we don't want to risk melting the cheese. So the first thing we do is we get our pellets going. And I'm just using a little butane torch, like a little creme brulee torch to start the first few pellets in here. Once they get good and hot and smoking, I can set this amazing smoke tube right inside the the cooker and it's going to do its job. It's just going to produce a light smoke. It doesn't take a whole lot to get this going. You see it goes pretty quick. I'm just putting it down in the bottom of my Yodar. I'm also going to put my deflector shield in. Now, I have my Yodar switched on just so the fans blowing just a little bit to keep it going, but all I want is this thin smoke rolling on this cheese. Let me get my deflector shield in place. So, now I kind of have a diffuser for the smoke. It's going to throw it out. It's going to keep it from getting too warm. And then I'm going to put my rack in and then we'll slide our cheese on top. So I've got them the them amazing smoke tube in the bottom generating this nice apple smoke. Not too thick, just just the right amount to add some flavor to the cheese. And I'm going to get the grate set right up on the top so it's away from it. So I'm not in any heat zone whatsoever. If you're doing this on another type grill to keep the temps down, you could put a just a metal pan with some ice in it, maybe a little water, just anything to keep the temps down. It's really best to cold smoke cheese in the winter months when it's cool outside. Cuz when you get temperatures up above 75°, it's just going to be too hot and they want to melt. You're going to release too much oil in the cheese. So before I brought the cheese outside, I took it out of the package and let it sit out at room temperature for about 30 minutes. And that lets some of the oil start to come up to the surface area in the blocks. I'm using a cheddar, KBY Jack, a pepper jack. Like you can use any kind of cheese that you like. They're all going to take on a unique flavor when you put them in the smoke. So the only thing now is to close the lid and just let them go for 3 4 hours in this cold smoked environment. We're keeping our temps low and we just got a nice mild smoke going over the cheese. Now, if you're if you're not using pellets, if you're using a a couple pieces of charcoal or maybe a few wood chips, you just want to keep them down in the bottom of your smoker and just keep a gentle smoke rolling. You don't want it to be thick and heavy. The cheese is is light and it's just going to absorb some of that flavor from that grill and from the smoker, and that's what's going to really taste good on the end product. So, we'll check on the cheese here in a little bit to see how we're doing. Okay, it's been four hours on our cheese, and the smoke from our tube is pretty much slowed all the way down. So, this it's had enough smoke. That's about as long as you want to go. 3 or 4 hours. But you can see pulled a little bit of the oil out of the cheese. So, it got a little warm in there, but it never did, you know, really got up to, I would guess, above 50 because I got it so far away and I got that deflector shield in between the the smoke tube and the cheese. So, all I did was really get some good smoke out of it. So, now we're going to take the cheese inside. Okay, we brought the cheese back inside after it's smoked for 4 hours. And now it really needs to rest for about 7 days in the refrigerator. So, you can see I wrapped one up here. You just want to wrap it up in plastic wrap, let it hang out in the refrigerator, and if there's any excess oil on the top of it. Sometimes I'll just go ahead and take a paper towel and kind of blot it just a little bit just to remove some of that. But just tear you off a little bit of plastic wrap and get it wrapped up. There's no right or wrong way there. As long as it's covered. And what this does, it really develops the smoked flavor. As the cheese cools in there and the oils go back inside, um it's going it's going to take that smoked flavor that we got on the outside and pull it deep inside. So when you slice it 7 days from now, it really has a a deeper smoke flavor. I'm going to go ahead and try a piece of this because I like to check and see what, you know, what kind of smoke flavor we got, knowing that it's going to be stronger after, you know, a week in the refrigerator. But you can still taste a lot of the smoke on the outside at this point, too. And this was a um like a sharp white cheddar that we added smoke to. And it's it's it's got a good mild smoke flavor. It's not too strong, so don't think you're going to get bitter with it. You should just be able to to get hints of the smoke without it really overpowering you. That's what really makes it um different than just traditional cheese out of the refrigerator. It's really good. So, I'm going to get the rest of these wrapped up. Get them rested in my refrigerator. You know, smoked cheese like this is great for gifts. I give them around the holiday football parties. It's good to set out on a cheese and cracker tray. Makes an excellent smoked sausage and smoked cheese platter. So, just play around with it. You know, the the the key to smoking cheese is keeping that temperature real low and just letting it sit and smoke for 3 or 4 hours, whatever kind of wood you like. I usually go with the fruit wood, something mild. If you like what we're doing here at How to Barbecq, right, please subscribe to our channel. We're going to keep putting out videos all year, so come back, check us out. We're also on Facebook and Twitter, so hit us up there if you want to send us some questions or comments. We'd love to get them. Till next time. [Music]