Pimento wood

[One Touch Platinum]

I did a jerk pork loin yesterday on the rotisserie...sorry no pics....and it came out great by the way but it was the first time that I ever used pimento wood. Before I cooked up some jerk chicken a few weeks ago I never even heard of pimento wood. My wife ordered a bag of it online the day we were doing up that chicken, I used apple wood for the smoke that day since it is supposed to be a pretty good substitution for pimento if you can't find it. My first impression....It really smokes! I tried to go easy on it since I read that too much can really ruin the taste and I guess I used just the right amount because the flavor was there but no bitterness. I put about a handfull of unsoaked wood on the coals right after I put the spit on and it smoked, alot . I had read that when doing jerk with pimento that you only want the smoke for the first 20 minutes or so and it stopped smoking after about 20 minutes so all went well. Meat will only absorb smoke for the first hour and any smoke after that will just darken the meat and may cause bitter soot type flavor so when it REALLY started smoking I was a little worried but it worked out great. I think that the next time I do jerk chicken I will use about half of the pimento that I did for the pork since chicken is more delicate than pork and the flavor would have probably been to overpowering.

[G$]

To clarify, and as you allude to a bit, meat will "absorb" smoke for as long as there is meat in the smoke environment.  (Properly, we should probably say it "adsorbs" smoke.)   Point being, the chemical reaction (myoglobin and NO2) that we witness by placing meat in a smokey environment stops once the meat reaches a certain temperature, but the addition of "smoke flavor" to the meat will continue as log as it is cooking over smoke.  We typically want to guard against the bitter, sooty taste that may happen as a result, especially with a strong wood or delicate meat.

Joe Corday, the Meat Extension Specialist at Iowa State's Meat Lab had a nice brief on the subject many years ago if anyone would like to go read about it.