Using Cinnamon in a Smoking Gun

Slofoodgroup Team July 31, 2021

Cinnamon Smoked Chèvre with Summer Berries

The term, “smoking gun” has taken on a whole new meaning with the rise in popularity of hand-held culinary smokers. If you have yet to get your hands on this fun and impressive kitchen gadget, you may just be missing out! We highly recommend them for infusing a delicate smokey flavor to everything from cocktails to cheeses and desserts to entrees. 

We love good smoked cheese, we love dessert, and we REALLY love cinnamon, so we decided to combine the three to create a one-of-a-kind dessert cheese with fresh summer berries!

Using a smoking gun to add flavor and depth to your ingredients couldn’t be easier. Simply prepare your cheese on the plate you plan on serving it on, add your smoker chips to your smoking gun, heat it, apply the smoke, and use the dome cover to hold the smoke in. The longer the lid stays on, the more intense the smoke will be. 

You can use a variety of wood chips and/or other ingredients to infuse flavor, but we particularly enjoy the subtle sweetness that cinnamon imparts. You can break the cinnamon sticks into small pieces with your hands, use a mortar and pestle, a grinder, or even place it in a bag and use a mallet. Rough pieces are fine for this use, but you could also use pre-ground cinnamon if that’s all you have on hand. For added depth of flavor, we added in a few rosemary sprigs, which incorporated an herbaceous scent. The combination of the two helped to emphasize and the overall sweetness and further-balance the tartness of the berries. 

This method of smoking can be used for any cheese, but we recommend starting on the lighter and softer sides of the spectrum, because it draws in flavor extremely well. Chèvre is a wonderful choice as a lighter dessert cheese and also takes on the flavor of the cinnamon and rosemary beautifully. 

Cinnamon smoke dessert cheese with berries 

Ingredients

• 4 ounces fresh chèvre
• 1 cinnamon stick, broken into small pieces 
• 1 rosemary sprig. 
• 8 ounces fresh summer berries (we used strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries)
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 
• Drizzle of honey

Pro tip: Learn how to make cinnamon-infused honey to drizzle over your dessert cheese!

Procedure

1. Prepare the goat cheese on the plate you plan to serve it on. 
2. Surround it with about half of your berries.
3. Cover the plate with your glass smoking dome.
4. Add the cinnamon and rosemary to the smoking gun and turn it on for about 20-30 seconds.
5. Fill the container completely with smoke.
6. Leave the smoking dome on, covering the cheese for about 7 minutes. 
7. Pull the dome lid off of the cheese and allow the smoke to disperse. 
8. Arrange the remaining berries around your smoked goat cheese 
9. Top with a drizzle of honey and a sprinkle of ground cinnamon, and serve to your sure-to-be-delighted guests!

 Why stop with cinnamon? We plan on trying star anise, cloves, mace blade, and even our spent (and dried) vanilla pods, peppercorn, and maybe even black tea. You can find a wide array of fantastic ingredients to use in your culinary experiments at our online spice store!