A gas range gives you heat but no smoke. An oven gives you neither. That is the gap between a steak cooked in a skillet in February and the same steak over charcoal in July, and it is not a gap you can close with technique.
However, you can close it with seasoning. Black Label Smoked Salt & Pepper is cold-smoked for two days, which puts real wood smoke into the one thing you were already putting on the food.
Two ingredients, Whiskey Barrel Smoked Sea Salt and Whiskey Barrel Smoked Black Pepper, both cold-smoked over oak whiskey barrel staves and sweet hickory splits for two days, then blended. That is the entire product.
No liquid smoke, no smoke flavoring, no anything else on the ingredient list. The interesting part is the process, because there are faster ways to make something taste smoky and none of them taste like this.
The short answer is slowly, and at a temperature low enough that nothing cooks.
Hot smoking would be quicker and it would ruin both ingredients. Pepper carries its aroma in volatile oils, and volatile means exactly what it sounds like: apply heat and they leave. You would end up with pepper that smells like a campfire and tastes like sawdust.
Salt has a different problem. It is hygroscopic, meaning it pulls moisture out of the air around it, and warm smoke carries a lot of moisture. Heat the chamber and the salt clumps, cakes, and stops flowing.
Cold smoking sidesteps both.
The smoke is generated in one place and cooled before it reaches the spices, so it deposits flavor compounds on and into the granules over hours without ever raising the temperature enough to damage them.
Smoke penetration is slow and it is not linear. The first few hours put smoke on the surface, which is the part you smell when you open the door. The flavor that lasts, the part that shows up in the food rather than in the room, takes far longer to work into the granule itself.
Two days is where that levels off for salt and pepper specifically. Less and the smoke sits on top and fades. More and it starts to turn acrid.
Oak whiskey barrel staves and sweet hickory do different jobs. Oak from a used barrel carries residual vanillin and caramelized sugars from the char inside, which is where the round, faintly sweet note comes from. Hickory is sharper and more assertive, the wood most associated with American barbecue, and it supplies the smoke people actually recognize as smoke.
Together you get depth from the oak and clarity from the hickory. Either one alone reads as incomplete.
Temperature, smoke density, and timing all had to be dialed in, and none of them are independent of each other. The trays also get rotated on a schedule, because smoke does not distribute evenly in a chamber and without rotation the outer edges take most of it while the center barely changes.
Salty and peppery, with toasted oak and sweet hickory sitting underneath and a pungent edge from the pepper that keeps it from reading as one flat smoky note.
What it tastes like, more usefully, is food that has been near fire. Not BBQ sauce, not bacon, not liquid smoke. The specific thing that happens to a steak over charcoal or a chicken that spent an hour in a smoker, where the smoke is part of the crust rather than something added to it. That is the whole reason it exists.
You can get that flavor onto a pork chop in a cast iron pan on a Tuesday in January, in the same motion you were already using to season it. The reason it works where liquid smoke does not is timing.
Liquid smoke announces itself the second it hits your tongue and then flattens out, because it is a coating sitting on the surface. Two days of cold smoke puts the flavor into the granule rather than on it, so the salt lands first and the smoke opens up behind it as you chew. That order is exactly how smoke behaves on something that actually came off a grill.
Not one to one, which surprises people. Equal parts would taste overwhelmingly peppery to most palates, and pepper would run over everything else on the plate.
Our Salt & Pepper Tableside Seasoning also runs 75 percent salt to 25 percent pepper, which is the traditional proportion and the one most home cooks land on without knowing they have.
Here is the part that took the most work. When we first blended the smoked version, our Whiskey Barrel Smoked Black Pepper was too coarse to stay mixed with the salt.
Two ingredients of different sizes separate. The heavier, larger particles migrate to the bottom of the jar, so the first shake is all salt and the last one is all pepper. That is not a ratio problem, it is a physics problem, and no amount of adjusting proportions fixes it.
The fix was matching the grind. We adjusted the pepper size until it integrated fully with the salt, which is why the blend pours consistently from the first shake to the last.
Anywhere you would reach for regular salt and pepper, which is most things.
But we do recommend a specific few places where the flavor of this blend does real work.
This is where it earns its price. Sprinkle it on after cooking, on burrata, sliced heirloom tomatoes, avocado toast, a soft-boiled egg, or buttered bread. Nothing is competing with it and the smoke reads clearly.
Salted Caprese Salad is a recipe that is clearest test of that, three ingredients that need almost nothing done to them. Tomato, basil, mozzarella, and a sprinkle that pulls all three together.
Recipe by Savory Spice Test Kitchen
Celebrate juicy summer tomatoes with this simple caprese salad recipe. Layered with slices of fresh mozzarella and...
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Over soft cheeses specifically, where the fat carries smoke well and the salt cuts through it. It is the easiest way to make a cheese board look considered.
Steak, chicken, pork, and root vegetables before they hit heat. Because it is coarse, it builds crust rather than dissolving into the surface.
Not on the outside of the patty, mixed through it. This is the difference between a burger that tastes seasoned and one that tastes like it was cooked over coals, and it is the single best use of the blend if you cook indoors.
Toss it with oil over potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or winter squash before they go in the oven. Roasting already browns the edges, and the smoke reads as if the whole pan came off a grill.
It is also the fastest way to make a vegetable side taste like it belongs next to barbecue, which matters when the main is smoked and the sides taste like they came from a different meal.
Salted watermelon is the entry point and it works better than it sounds, which is where Smoky Watermelon Feta Salad came from. Same logic on grilled peaches or pineapple.
Salt in dessert is standard now. Smoke is not, and it does the same job from further away, cutting sweetness while adding something the sugar cannot supply on its own. These Cherry Bonfire Bars are built on exactly that, smoke against cherry and chocolate so the fruit reads brighter than it would otherwise.
The coarse grind is what makes this work. Fine salt slides off a wet glass and dissolves into the first sip, while these crystals catch on the rim and stay there through the drink.
Run a citrus wedge around the edge and roll it in the blend. It belongs on a bloody mary, where the smoke picks up the tomato and horseradish, and on a margarita, where it does what a smoky mezcal would.
It also works on a michelada, and on the rim of a whiskey sour or an old fashioned, where the oak in the smoke meets the oak in the barrel.
This is the case for keeping it on the counter. Most of the year, most people are cooking indoors, and the flavor they miss is smoke. A gas range gives you heat and browning but no smoke at all, and an oven gives you neither.
Liquid smoke is the usual workaround and it has a problem: it goes on wet, so it sits on the surface and tastes like it was added rather than developed. A smoked salt puts the smoke inside the seasoning you were already using, so it seasons and smokes in the same motion. Our Black Label Burger recipe is one of our best examples of that flavor.
Our recipe for a Flat Irons Prime Rib Roast takes the same idea to an 8-12 lb roast.
The recipe already calls for Whiskey Barrel Smoked Black Pepper worked into a garlic butter rub, which is how an oven roast ends up with a crust that reads like it spent time near fire. Swap the smoked pepper and Mayan Sea Salt for Black Label and you get both halves from one jar.
Recipe by Savory Spice Test Kitchen
Our customer-favorite Flat Irons Prime Rib Rub is the star of this hearty holiday classic. This blend is bittersweet...
Roasting
Anything smoked you already own will get you partway.
A smoked paprika, a chipotle powder, a smoked sea salt, even a pinch of a hickory-based BBQ rub next to your regular salt and pepper. None of them are the same thing, since you are layering smoke alongside the seasoning rather than having it built in, but they get the flavor onto the plate.
If you want to be more deliberate about it, this blend is really just two products we sell separately. Whiskey Barrel Smoked Sea Salt and Whiskey Barrel Smoked Black Pepper go three parts salt to one part pepper and you are essentially there, minus the matched grind that keeps it from separating in the jar.
Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt is the other direction worth knowing about. Alder is a milder, sweeter smoke than hickory or oak, so pair it with your everyday pepper when you want the smoke sitting further back. It is also the better choice on fish, where hickory can run over something delicate.
And if you have no smoked spices at all, regular salt and pepper with a drop of liquid smoke gets you in the neighborhood. It will taste like smoke on the food rather than in it, but it works in a pinch
Most seasonings improve one category of food. This one improves whatever you were already making, because you were already using salt and pepper on it.
That is also the catch. A jar goes faster than you expect once it is sitting next to the stove instead of in the cabinet, and refill bags hold more for less than a new jar costs.
Shop Black Label Smoked Salt & Pepper →
Browse all salt & pepper →
Go behind the seasoning on more of the basics: Pepper, Garlic, and Red Rocks Hickory Smoke.
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