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Where there’s smoke there’s … flavour

By Jeanne Calitz, 27 February 2025

Newsflash: smoking food and smoked ingredients is a sizzling food trend for 2025, both in South African and abroad. We investigate who’s playing with fire, how they’re doing it – and how you could do it at home.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, but where there’s smoke there’s also flavour, and heaps of it. Smoked food is a big trend for 2025, thanks in part to the popularity of open-flame cooking. The fat is in the fire all right – but as it turns out, that’s a good thing.

Says Abigail Donnelly, food director at TASTE: “Smoking food, smoked sauces, smoked condiments – there’s a lot of smoking going on. I think it has a lot to do with the rise in popularity of flame-grilled cooking or so-called ‘outdoor’ cooking.” Whatever the case, people are going bananas for dishes with a whisper of smoke.

And it’s gone light years beyond the charred character of a grilled steak or the distinctive flavour of a piece of smoked salmon: chefs are getting wildly inventive and smoking surprising ingredients – think smoked ricotta, smoked honey, smoked strawberries, smoked pineapple!

We dug a little deeper into this trend: who’s doing it, how they’re doing it – and how you can do it yourself.

Pineapple-and-chipotle-glazed gammon

Who’s playing with fire?

There are so many chefs currently having the time of their lives with this trend. In Britain, the acclaimed St John range of restaurants features smoked cod roe (with some version of egg, whether it be boiled or coddled) on the menus at all three of its outposts. And then there’s our very own (recently crowned Michelin young chef of the year) Ash Valenzuela-Heeger, whose Riverine Rabbit restaurant in Birmingham recently featured delectable dishes such as ragu with smoked squash and spicy béchamel sauce, as well as charred leeks with brown butter Hollandaise.

Locally, chef David Higgs is all fired up at Marble in Johannesburg (and now in Cape Town, too) where all the food is cooked over the coals. But apart from what you would expect (all those lovely, perfectly cooked cuts of meat), you’ll find inventive dishes such as wood-fired asparagus with smoked brinjal-and-garlic cream, and a confit duck leg with smoked ricotta, thyme-roasted naartjies and bok choy.

Another chef having some fun with smoky flavours is award-winning Luke Dale Roberts, whose recent menu at Salon featured a chipotle tuna sandwich with smoked pineapple, coriander pesto, masa harina and chipotle dressing.

And then of course there’s Ivor Jones, head chef at Chef’s Warehouse at Beau Constantia in Cape Town, who has been cooking predominantly with fire for the last eight years and speaks very highly of this technique.

Lamb belly kebabs recipe

“A lot of our dishes have elements that come from the fire,” he says. “It just adds a wonderful depth to the food – it’s not just smoke for smoke’s sake; there’s a level of complexity that we’re going for; a richness.”

Ivor emphasises that cooking with fire and playing with smoky elements “opens up so many possibilities in the kitchen”. And it’s obvious that they’re having enormous fun with all these options. From making a dressing directly on the fire instead of on the stovetop (“we put the whole pan in the fire and close the vents to capture all those smoky elements”), to cooking up what Ivor laughingly calls “ham nuts” (macadamia nuts brined in gammon fat, then smoked), to smoking their own butters and even making smoked ice cream (the cream is infused with charred logs), it’s clear that the sky’s the limit here.

“There are so many levels to cooking with fire,” Ivor enthuses. “There are the different woods to play with, the different techniques – cold-smoking versus hot-smoking. There’s the way you get to play with salt and fats – fat takes on a lot of those fire elements. For example, we cook all our bread over the fire, but we also brush the bread with olive oil, then the fat in the olive oil chars and you get another layer of that smoky flavour.”

“It’s about developing a more interesting taste profile,” he says. “It’s about building levels of flavour.” Well, what more motivation do you need?

Smoked dhal with grilled paneer recipe

Out of the frying pan, into the fire

So how do you SIY (smoke it yourself)? Luckily, you can have fun with this trend without having to get your hands dirty or even needing to fire up the braai. Woolworths offers plenty of smoked ingredients that will add a punch of smoky flavour to your cooking.

These include:

Smoked cod roe paste for a cool Scandi twist to your scrambled eggs on toast.
Smoked Stanford cheese will do amazing things for your next braaibroodjie, not to mention that pizza you were planning

Rosemary, smoked cheese and potato gluten-free pizza recipe

- Repeat after us: smoked spices are your friends. Particularly these two options: Woolworths smoked chilli seasoning and oak-smoked chilli flakes , both of which are just begging to be added to any Mexican dishes you might be planning. Or even if you’re just in the market for a quick snack – how about some tasty baby marrow chips with smoked chilli salt.

Finally, the best way to add an instant burst of smoky flavour to basically anything, but particularly effective in meaty dishes, is liquid smoke, a.k.a your secret braai superpower. (Try it in this recipe for home-made BBQ sauce:)