Smoking woods in Zambia

[Frans]

Here's a challenge for someone: I live in Zambia and have just built a smoker. Being from the U.S., I never paid much attention to tree species or anything of that sort when choosing smoking woods. Hickory was my go-to wood for just about everything I smoked. Zambia, unfortunately, has no Hickory, so far as I can tell. There is little information about predominant tree species, and those that are listed are not familiar to me.

So, does anyone have knowledge about smoking woods in sub-Saharan Africa? It's worth a free meal and lodging at my place, if ever you're tromping through Lusaka, Zambia.

Whatever you do, stay away from Tambotie- that will put you in hospital fast.

 

[JohanRSA]

Hi guys. Thanks for all the information. I am from a small town near kimberley in SA. I've been smoking for a while on a very small scale and last year I build a smoker that can smoke hot and cold. This post made me join this forum. I was also trying to research woods to use for my smoking. Over the passed years I've mostly used old oak wine barrel sawings that you can buy in any supermarket in SA. I've seen that takealot.com (RSA's amazon) have a massive variety of different woods for smoking that you could order to be delivered to your home. If they don't do any international delivery, i am sure us in SA will be able to help you guys in upper Africa to buy it and then separately courier it to you.

As for woods that I've been using with great success after I started experimenting with my own wood sawings, they are the following:
1. Pecan
2. Silky oak
3. Swart hak (its a local acacia, directly translated into black hook, acacia mellifera)
4. Transvaal Boeken hout (Faurea Saligna)

I'll make a separate thread with some of my recipes etc.

Attached is a picture of my smoker.

 

[JohanRSA]

Results are in: the smoke flavour is superb after being cold smoked for 2 1/2 hrs on mukwa saw dust. Bacon came out a bit salty, I'm guessing I should reduce the curing time with salt/sugar mix to 2 days instead of 3? But very nice flavour apart from salt content.

Hi, please look at my posts, I'll make a post later with my homemade cure. It works and have been well refined over the passed few years. I was planing to just post a picture quickly of my recipe, but its in afrikaans, so i have to translate it quickly. See attached a picture of my recent set of beef brisket that i cured.