So, for my second experiment with the Emson smoker,  I decided to try smoking some tomatoes.  I bought some organic cherry tomatoes that I found on sale at Vert Pomme Fruterie, and some brown tomatoes, both grown in Canada (yay!).  After a bit of research, I decided to leave the cherries whole, and cut the brown tomatoes in half, before smoking for ten minutes on the hot-smoke cycle.  My boyfriend suggested we also try smoking some sundried tomatoes.  So, we loaded everything into the smoker:

The cherries were too small to stay on the rack, so we decided to put them on parchement paper. My boyfriend punched holes in the parchement paper, but I’m not sure that’s really necessary. I left him to start up the smoker while I went to attend to other things.

Unfortunately, he thought he had to soak the wood chips- so they never lit and didn’t actually smoke.  The tomatoes only smelled a bit smoky due to residual smoke inside the smoker.  So let this be a lesson to you; don’t soak wood chips when using the Emson Smoker!

However, all was not lost!  When we learned of our error, I suggested that we try cold-smoking the tomatoes for 10 minutes.

That worked out well.  The cherry tomatoes and the brown tomatoes were delightfully sweet and smokey.  The smoked sundried tomatoes were amazing.

The smell of smoke is a bit more prominent during the cold-smoking process, but it’s certainly not overly invasive, nor is it strong enough to set off smoke detectors.

I used the smoked cherry and brown tomatoes to make a tomato soup.

I topped it with some chopped eggs that we had also smoked, cilanto, sour cream, and avocado oil.  The flavour was really nice.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  Until next time,

Sarah