The summer grilling season typically conjures up images of burgers and brats, but I get fewer raised eyebrows these days when I suggest in my Grilled and Smoked workshop, and share recipes for, grilling asparagus, corn, and pineapple. Smoking vegetables and fruit is just as effective at adding flavor, as I explain this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon.

With smoking, you have the option of adding heat or not, which creates a different effect from a searing-hot grill. Cold-smoked vegetables retain more of their raw crispness, and cold-smoked fruits, like cherries, stay plumper and juicier. Hot smoking or preroasting works better for dense root vegetables that you want to make soft and tender, like beets.

Because produce absorbs smoke far more quickly than, say, brisket, you don’t need an expensive smoker—and some might actually get too hot for cold smoking. I smoke all of my vegetables, fruits, cheese, and fish in an old Weber kettle grill. I started with woodchips and a few briquettes and now use a smoke tube loaded with pellets to ensure the lowest smoking temperature.

Learn more about smoking produce and get the complete recipe for Smoked Cherries in my column.

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Twice as Tasty

Cherries have become one of my favorite fruits to enhance with smoke, particularly because I use many of them as the basis for homemade cocktail cherries, a recipe I’ll share in next week’s column. But it seems like every time I light a smoke tube, I throw on something new to see how it takes the flavor. I return from coastal trips with black cod collars, scraps that are far more affordable than fillets and become deliciously buttery and rich when smoked. I smoke butter and Parmesan cheese to toss with noodles for an even more flavorful twist on traditional Alfredo sauce. I’ve also tried smoking just about every vegetable and fruit my garden produces, from garlic scapes to plums, and vegetables I initially only grilled, like eggplant for baba ghanoush.

Are you excited to try smoking your food? Here are just a few other recipes on the blog for smoking and using smoked produce. You can find more in the recipe index.

• Home-Smoked Chili Peppers
• Roasted and Smoked Beets with Orange Vinaigrette
• Smoked and grilled mushrooms with Vegan Memphis-Style Barbecue Sauce
• Smoky Homemade Chili Paste
• Vegetarian Smoked-Beet Reuben
• Goat Cheese and Smoked-Beet Sandwiches

You can learn more about how to set up your own DIY smoker in a charcoal or gas grill in this Beacon column. I give times and temperatures for smoking various vegetables, fruits, cheese, and fish in this blog post.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.