You think it’s not possible to be geeky about wood chunks? I beg to differ.

In my shed right now, I have chunks of cherry wood, hickory, silver maple, white oak and blackjack oak. The silver maple and white oak are from trees in the yard, I bought the cherry and hickory at the corner hardware store and my in-laws mailed the blackjack oak chunks up to me from their property in Florida.

Huh?

They’re for flavoring food and I use them when I barbecue. Each wood has a different strength and imparts a different flavor. It all depends on what I’m going for on a given barbecue day.

For example: On Christmas, I hot-smoked a six-pound rib roast that was covered in a garlic and fresh herb paste. Now, a rib roast is a tender hunk of meat, so you don’t need to slow-cook it the way you would with a brisket. You also don’t want to make the smoke flavoring very heavy — you want the meat, and in this case the herb and garlic crust, to speak for themselves.

So: I used one chunk, and one chunk only, of silver maple in the smoker. It’s the mildest wood I have. I also didn’t soak the wood in water, causing it to burn quicker and limiting the amount of smoke it would put out. I also cooked the roast at 350 degrees in the smoker — a full 125 degrees hotter than I cook a typical hunk of barbecue meat

That provided a very light smoke flavor to the meat, just enough to detect but not enough to really change the character of the rib roast.

Silver maple is good for this, or for smoking fish or chicken/turkey. The white oak is just a little stronger. Cherry is also a mild smoke wood, but it adds a bit of a dark smoke undertone to the flavor. I really haven’t found that good of use for it and I rarely use it.

Blackjack oak has a stronger oak flavor and it’s extremely versatile. It’s my favorite wood. I like the flavor and I vary the strength by simply changing the amount of wood I use.

Next comes hickory. People are accustomed to it but it’s actually fairly strong. Oversmoking — particulary by using hickory — is the single most common mistake that barbecuers make. If you’ve eaten bitter-tasting barbecue that reeks of smoke, hickory was probably involved.

Even stronger than hickory is mesquite. I don’t use mesquite at all. It’s a trendy wood but it is very strong. It’s good for grilling but if it’s used for long smokes, it will turn any meat very bitter. It doesn’t work with mild meats, such as chicken or fish, at all in my opinion.

Told you this was going to be geeky. I wonder if I actually might improve the world in some way if my knowledge was concentrated on, say, medical research instead of the smoking quality of wood chunks. Anyway, here’s a handy guide to smoke woods.