Articles of Mastication

Smoked Avocado

A few weeks ago I saw a recipe for guacamole on a popular food blog that called for “perfectly ripe” avocados. I was compelled to comment that there’s so much joy to be gotten from unripe and over-ripe fruits and vegetables, even avocados. More than a few cultures are known to make use of unripened fruits as if they were vegetables. Green mango is pickled in India and made into salads in Thailand, for instance. I enjoy thin slices of green mango with a dash of salt, cayenne powder and lime juice; the bright, malic pucker gradually gives way to hints of aromas the fruit would have in full ripeness, and the yet-unformed sugars add a starchy dimension of texture to the mouthfeel. Fried green tomatoes are a staple of Southern home cooking in the U.S., and they’re pickled in Bosnia. The list goes on, but let’s get back to avocados.

In my comment at the aforementioned blog, I spieled on the old “levels of texture and flavor” riff, even going so far as to suggest to the author that she dice and pickle some unripe avocado in lime juice and salt, then incorporate it into the guacamole with the perfectly ripe ones. I believe I said something like “little explosions of flavor.”

Then the chef side of my brain got stuck on avocados, and my subconscious involuntarily began concocting a new method of preparing the fatty, fibrous goblins. Comparison and association play a large role in developing new dishes for me, and in this case I focused my free association on the high fat content of avocados. Fat. Lipids. One of the things fat does really well is absorb aromatic compounds, which is why it conducts flavor so well. But my story must now take a brief detour…

Back in midwinter there was a freezing rain storm in the Midwest that caused tree branches to sag and snap under the weight of a heavy ice glaze. The effects of the storm were gorgeously quasi-fractal to behold. Grass, branch and foliage were soundly glazed over with ice.

I had my eye on a drooping, three-trunked birch tree in the neighborhood. One of the trunks was in serious peril of breaking off, and after two days of struggling against gravity, it finally snapped.

Once all of the devastation was sliced up and lain out in neat little piles for emergency workers to cart off, I approached the neighbor who owned the birch and asked if I could have the wood. Her reply: Affirmative. I whisked the bundles of wood away and allowed them to dry for a week. Birch is traditionally the wood of preference for smoking meat in Scandinavia, but I’d never used it in anything I’d smoked. It was time to give it a shot, and the first thing I did was cold-smoke some sliced, under-ripe avocado for about three hours. The effects were pretty incredible. They looked like avocado slices that had been left out to brown, but the brown was wood smoke residue (the phenolic compounds in wood smoke actually prevent oxidization, so they didn’t brown any further). I incorporated them with a julienne of smoked bacon into this salad, which additionally comprised radicchio, Romaine lettuce, red and yellow peppers, red and white onion and a pickled key lime and chili vinaigrette.

It was a good enough salad, but the greens and vinaigrette drew attention away from what I really wanted to taste: smoked avocado. Next time, I’ll focus a dish on sliced, smoked avocado… I’m thinking with Gorgonzola and perhaps a drizzle of reduced balsamic vinegar, or maybe some red pepper puree. I have plenty of birch left, and hopefully I’ll get around to plating something like that up for you soon.

I wondered, of course, if anyone else had ever thought to smoke avocado. I had a feeling it was a first (and I wanted it to be), but a thorough Googling revealed that Chef Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit in New York has featured smoked avocado with salmon roe on one of the cafe’s past menus. Smoked avocado wasn’t a first, but it’s nice to know that my instincts keep good company.