One of Chef and I’s favorite pieces of equipment at the restaurant is the Southern Pride smoker we have out back. It came with the building. At first I wasn’t sure it was going to work with our concept, but we’ve used it since day one and never looked back. We’ve always smoked our own pork and brisket, and have just started to use it for our turkey as well. It’s a unique, “old school” commercial smoker providing for a more modern restaurant. Bringing smoked meats to our menu has been really fun, and has become a big part of who we are and what we do here.

But why do people love smoke on their meats? It could be connected to the fact that it’s elemental, and universal. As Korean-American-Southern chef Edward Lee writes in his 2013 cookbook, “Smoke & Pickles,” the appeal spans the continents. But he goes further. “Some say umami is the fifth [taste], in addition to salty, sweet, sour, and bitter,” Lee writes. “I say smoke is the sixth.”

But there isn’t a responder in the taste buds for smoke, so how do we “taste” it? Says author Jim Shahin in his article for the Washington Post: The answer is a little complicated, and it first requires us to distinguish between flavor and taste. Flavor comprises three elements: taste (which we detect in receptors found in the taste buds), physical stimulation (such as texture, sound, appearance and pain — think jalapeños) and smell.

“Most of the flavor of smoke is smell,” says Marcia Pelchat, a sensory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. Smoke is made up of gases, water vapor and small particles resulting from combustion. It contains chemicals from cellulose and lignin, the primary constituents of wood, which break down into other compounds that we detect as aromas.

I’ve always heard, and still believe, that nothing brings to mind memories from the past like smell. Wether it’s that BBQ smell in your friends backyard, a certain perfume, the whiskey in your glass, or the smell of the ocean on a breezy day, the olfactory is a powerful sense when it comes to memory. Tom Stafford with BBC’s Future writes regarding the differences between smell and the other senses “…with smell the situation is different. Rather than visiting the thalamic relay station on its journey into the brain, smell information travels directly to the major site of processing – the olfactory bulb – with nothing in between. We do not know what stopping off at the thalamus does for the other senses, but it certainly means that signals generated in the other senses are somehow “further away” from the nexus of processing done in the brain.”

Smell triggers memories, that much we can say for certain. It can trigger personal, atavistic and even ancestral ones. Since humans used fire to cook food since the dawn of man, isn’t it reasonable to assume that part of our love of smoked meats comes from our ancestral culinary past? Pelchat goes on to say “In evolutionary terms, we all started cooking with fire. That smoky smell is a really strong stimulus.”

So come on by House Rock Kitchen for the best smoked brisket, pork, and turkey around. Slow smoked to perfection with pecan, we’re sure to satisfy even the most discerning caveman.