The low smoking temperatures prevent the paper from catching fire or smoldering. Here is everything you need to know about using butcher paper for your BBQ. Butcher paper is a type of thick kraft paper. Like all paper products, butcher paper is made from wood pulp, but it has also been treated to be especially strong and durable.
Butcher paper usually comes in sheets or rolls and is typically white, pink or brown in color. The butcher paper most popular for backyard BBQ is the pinkish-red colored paper. This high-quality paper is made from FDA-approved food-grade wood pulp. Unlike white butcher paper, true pink paper gets its color naturally from the wood pulp.
Manufacturers use bleach to make butcher paper white in color, and some make pink paper with artificial dyes. While you can use any color butcher paper in your smoker , the pink stuff is what all the cool kids are using these days.
It may be a bit more expensive than the white butcher paper, and it can be harder to find in your local stores. Some butcher papers have a coating of wax or polyethylene to prevent leakage, which would melt into your food on a smoker.
While these products may appear similar, freezer paper and steak paper are unsuitable for use in a smoker. The most common reason to wrap your meat in pink butcher paper is to get around the meat stall. This is the period during a low-and-slow smoking session when your meat refuses to rise in temperature. Cuts like brisket, pork butt, pork shoulder, and ribs of all kinds often stall for several hours before they begin to rise again.
Smoking a whole brisket can take over 14 hours unless you use something like pink butcher paper to speed through the stall. Wrapping your meat in pink butcher paper is one version of a technique called the Texas Crutch. This allows some of the meat juices to evaporate and form that thick, crusty bark your guests will go wild for. Your butcher paper wrapped meat may not be as juicy as one wrapped with a different product. Most pitmasters wrap their meat after a few hours of smoking.
Some BBQ masters prefer to wait until their meat stalls to wrap it up. Once your meat hits the desired temp, pull it from the smoker and wrap tightly in two layers of paper. Fold over the edges to seal tightly. Put the meat back in the smoker, and watch the temperature. Once it is within a few degrees of your finish temp, pull the wrapped meat and allow it to rest for an hour before unwrapping and slicing. Pink butcher paper makes an attractive display for your sliced or shredded smoked meat, and you can use it to wrap your smoked or grilled foods during the resting period to hold in heat.
The flavors inside the package mingle with the steam, gently cooking and flavoring your food. The paper has a tendency to burn, even using indirect heat. Buy from Amazon. For the best results, I recommend sticking with a high-quality pink paper made specifically for BBQing.
These papers might be too thin to hold in moisture and tear too easily as well. Mighty Dreams Pink Butcher Paper is an excellent option if you are looking to crutch a brisket or pulled pork. I keep a large roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil under my grill at all times and frequently reach for it. It also seals in the moisture and prevents the juices from evaporating away inside your smoker or grill.
Foil is durable, versatile and very inexpensive. You can easily find high-quality heavy-duty foil at your local supermarket or online. There are many types of metallic foils used for crafts and jewelry making, but you should only use a food-grade aluminum foil in your grill or smoker.
Foil is very pliable and wraps tightly around objects without needing tape or twine to seal it closed. This makes it ideal for all sorts of cooking applications.
There have been rumors that aluminum leaches out of the foil during the cooking process and absorbs into your food. The truth is a bit murkier and a lot less dramatic than the rumors. Very little aluminum leaches out of foil at room temperature or under refrigerator conditions.
So you should not worry about using foil to store your leftovers or to wrap up a steak for the freezer. Cooking with aluminum is a bit different, though. According to a study , aluminum can leach out of the foil under higher temperatures, like on a smoker or grill. The rate of aluminum-leaching increases when you add acidic ingredients to the foil, such as vinegar, tomato or lemon juice.
The real question is whether this leached aluminum is dangerous to our health? Professional chefs and pitmasters alike use foil on a daily basis in kitchens around the world. Our bodies are able to remove a certain amount of aluminum, and it is naturally found in many foods. It seems unlikely that cooking in aluminum foil is a major health hazard. You might also wrap your food in butcher or parchment paper first, and then use foil for the outside layer.
If you discard the juices that collect inside the package, the amount of aluminum in your food should be minimal. Foil is the perfect wrapper to use for both low-heat smoking and high-heat grilling applications. You can basically use it to cook anything on your grill or smoker. You can wrap the meat or vegetables in foil to cruise past a meat stall or just speed up the cooking process. Foil is the ideal wrapping for sealing in the moisture on a low-and-slow smoked brisket. Foil is also ideal for reheating a batch of ribs or pulled pork on your grill.
Using foil to reheat food on a grill can help prevent the sauces or juices from burning. It also helps keep your meat from getting too dry as it reheats, especially if you add some apple juice to the leftovers. You can use foil in many ways while cooking on your grill or smoker. Foil is also a useful tool for other BBQ purposes, as you will see. If you plan to use foil to crutch a stalled brisket or pork butt, then the timing of the wrap is the same as with the pink butcher paper.
Smoke your meat for a few hours, and then wrap it in foil to push past the stall. One difference between using butcher paper vs foil for crutching is that you can get a tighter wrap with foil. There is always going to be evaporation when you use butcher paper, but you can get a true airtight seal with foil if you do it right. You can read all about foil wrapping in my article on the Texas Crutch. The foil is going to limit the formation of the bark on the exterior of your meat because less moisture can evaporate from the surface.
Then you can finish it unwrapped on your grill or smoker, so the bark dries out a bit and intensifies in flavor. In addition to crutching and reheating food, you can also cook food inside a sealed foil packet on your grill. This is a great way to steam some veggies or cook a delicate filet of fish. Just tear off a square of foil big enough to hold your food, and add a drizzle of oil.
Season well, fold up the packet and place it in your grill. I often use foil to make a disposable drip pan for my gas grill. This is a great way to prevent the grill from accumulating a lot of grease while indirectly cooking bone-in chicken. Just fold up the edges of the foil to hold the drippings, and slip it between the burners and grill grates under your meat. I keep the water pan in my smoker lined with foil to make it easy to clean and help it last longer.
Foil comes in a range of sizes and thicknesses, but for BBQing, you want the wider rolls of the heavy-duty stuff. The typical rolls of foil used in the kitchen may be too short and thin to accommodate a brisket or pulled pork. Some foils also have a coating to prevent food from sticking to it, but these are not suitable for a grill or smoker. Just go with a reliable brand of heavy-duty foil and avoid anything labeled non-stick. My go-to foil for crutching is this high-quality product from Reynolds.
This is a shame, because in many cases parchment paper may actually be a better option in a grill or smoker. I think a lot of outdoor chefs avoid using parchment paper simply because they are unfamiliar with it.
Parchment paper is a lightweight and thin paper with several qualities that make it ideal for use in a smoker or on a grill. Parchment paper is surprisingly strong given how thin the sheets are. It is typically sold in precut sheets or rolls and can be found in grocery stores aisles and online.
Parchment paper is made from wood pulp, like all paper products. But manufacturers also treat the paper with sulfuric acid or zinc chloride, which gelatinizes some of the cellulose fibers.
A side effect of this treatment is that parchment paper is less-permeable than butcher or writing paper. Instead of absorbing moisture from food, a wrapping of parchment paper can retain some of these juices.
But it still allows a bit of evaporation, so your meat develops a tasty bark. Parchment paper is suitable to use in a smoker and is stable enough to go on your grill as well. Parchment paper is a great option for crutching meat in your smoker.
It allows some of the juices to evaporate, so you still get a nice amount of bark formation. But parchment paper also holds in more heat and moisture than butcher paper. But it should be safe to use with indirect heat.
Avoid buying pink paper that has added colors that may not be safe. Pink butcher paper is used for barbecuing for several reasons.
The main way to use it is to wrap a large piece of meat when you are smoking. This is typically done around degrees internal temperature and speeds up the cooking process, helping to get that hunk of brisket past the stall temperature. Peach paper starts as long, fine strands of wood pulp that gives the material strength and durability. It's common for pink butcher paper to have a treatment that helps to make the paper strong and resist smoldering. Peach paper is not to be used on the grill or barbecue, even on indirect heat because it will catch fire.
Wrapping your meat in the smoker helps enhance the bark and keeps the majority of moisture in the meat. Peach paper will absorb some moisture and also allows some evaporation, but not so much to ruin your meal when you are cooking.
Here is where confusion begins — understanding the difference between using butcher paper, foil, or parchment in terms of your finished meal. Let's see if we can help unravel the differences and show you the right way to use these different products.
As we pointed out above, butcher paper is food-grade wood pulp and the highest quality is peach-colored. It absorbs some moisture, but less than untreated paper. It's generally okay to use pink butcher paper up to the mid's. Aluminum foil is one of the most commonly available products that is perfectly suited to grilling, barbecue, and smoking.
It works great for wrapping odd-shaped meats and has a very high burn temperature. You'll have a hard time getting your grill up to the 1, degrees it takes to ignite aluminum foil.
There is some concern that aluminum foil may create an unhealthy situation when used on the grill or barbecue. As temps increase, aluminum particles can release from the foil and get into your food. Current science says there is little to no concern about using aluminum foil for cooking. Your body uses a little aluminum and can process leftovers unless you get a serious dose. Parchment paper is a staple in any bakers kitchen, but is it safe to use on the grill? You could use parchment paper, provided your temps stay very low, but we don't really recommend it.
Parchment paper typically uses a coating to provide flame resistance, but it will smolder at degrees, contaminating your food. Although these two products look similar and are frequently sold in the same part of the grocery store, they are different.
Freezer paper is treated with silicone and other chemicals to increase the strength of the product when it gets wet.
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