The Best Types Of Wood Chips To Use With A Gas Grill

Backyard chefs often rhapsodize over the smoky flavor provided by a barbecue, but simply cooking your food outdoors may not make it sufficiently flavorful. If you really want to bring the smoke, adding wood chips does the trick. A wide variety of wood chips is available for grilling, including hickory (a great choice for smoking your Thanksgiving turkey), mesquite, apple, cherry, and peach. (Andrew Zimmern's a big fruitwood fan, especially for fish and chicken.)

If you've watched a grilling video that shows someone scattering wood chips over charcoal, you may be wondering if you can also use wood chips with a gas grill, and if so, which chips should you choose? The answer to the first question is yes, you can, and it's a good thing, too, because gas grills don't produce much smoke flavor on their own. As for the second, we asked Greg Gatlin, semifinalist for the 2023 James Beard Award for Best Chef and the eponymous founder of two Houston restaurants (Gatlin's BBQ and Gatlin's Fins & Feathers), for advice. Gatlin's recommendation is to use either pecan or oak chips. "The heat source is being provided via gas, so a hot burning wood may not be necessary," he explains.

One difference between gas and charcoal grills is that the former can be easier to use since the technique is more similar to cooking indoors on a gas range. However, charcoal grills hold a decided advantage when adding wood chips since you can just drop them right on top of the coals. Of course, this isn't something you can do with a gas grill. Instead, you'll either need to purchase a smoker box to hold the wood chips or wrap them in a perforated aluminum foil packet before putting them on the heating element.

You may also need to choose the right recipe to make sure you're getting the most out of your wood chips. For the meat to absorb any real flavor from them, they'll need to be smoking away for at least half an hour. This means that instead of using them for a quick-seared steak, you'll get better results if you're using your gas grill to barbecue half a chicken for an hour over indirect heat.