The Best Wood Chips For Smoking Meat That You Can Buy

This variety pack is something with a bit more of a balanced profile, with some of the same options as our winner, but replacing the more savory, powerful tasting hickory wood with apple wood, which is perfect for cooking fish and other foods that require a “borderline” flavor profile.

The amount you get here is good as well, with a lot of cherry and apple, and a relatively smaller amount of alder and oak, each bag filled to the brim with nice small chips that are easy to burn.

The wood is natural, ecologically sourced, and comes with recyclable bags and boxes, which are nice for having a more sustainable wood harvest.

All in all a great option if you don’t like how overpowering hickory is and prefer to have apple instead.

These are some hefty chunks, much larger and thicker than most of the smoking chips on this list.

This is also the variety pack that lives very much on the sweet side of the flavor spectrum, with a collection of three fruit woods (apple, cherry, and peach) plus maple wood.

This is great mix of wood chips for smoking meats you want to slather with Kansas city style sauces (to up the sweetness), or as an offset to more savory spices, rubs, and sauces down the line.

The peach wood is the real anomaly here. You don’t see that one very often, even in and around Georgia; peach cooking is usually done incorporating actual peaches into the cooking (like as a sauce base) rather than a smoking wood in my experience.

This makes this a fairly unique variety pack. Finding peach wood at all is fairly difficult, and it’s certainly not usually found as part of any kind of assortment.

So in addition to the sets other strengths (high quality wood, large chunks, design for use with gas and electric grills) it’s well worth picking up if you’re just very curious as to what peach wood will bring to your cooking.

Another good assortment from Smokehouse Products, this time focus on quantity a bit more than others.

These are nice small chips (closer to sawdust in consistency), which catch quickly; perfect for low and slow smoking. The wood is high quality (all natural hardwood) and the variety is great.

You get a lot of hickory with this one; a great base for both using on its own or as the majority option with some kind of blend. The others included are popular and versatile flavors as well: apple, cherry, and alder, all staples of most barbeque “schools” that go well with any meat in different combinations, and work well with a variety of vegetables too.

This one is a bit pricier than the others, but not overly so, especially when you take into account that you get a whole lot more in this package than anything else on this list.

A great deal for what you get, with the only “drawback” being that it has a whole lot of hickory in it if you’re one of those people that doesn’t like hickory smoked meats very much.

This is a collection of Western’s three most popular flavors: apple, hickory, and mesquite.

A lot of these variety packs and assortments don’t include mesquite, so it’s nice to see it represented for once, given how prominent it is in a few of my own preferred barbeque styles. The taste can be a bit strong, but the apple is a good way of cutting it a bit.

All of the wood chips are high quality hardwood, and the individual pieces are a good size. Somewhere between a chip and a chunk, but definitely not the nearly sawdust quality that some others provide. This is either a good or a bad thing depending on how you prefer to smoke your meat. These are made for more medium or high heat quick smoking than slow smoking, but they can be used for the latter so long as you remember to trade out trays regularly.

The price is good, though a BIT expensive for the amount you get. Enough to be worth remarking on, but not enough to really change my recommendation: this is a great assortment of wood chips with a solid variety and excellent utility.

Moving from assortments to single variety chips for these last two, we have Jack Daniel’s signature wood smoking chips.

Jack Daniel’s barbeque is an interesting beast, what I’d call a “gimmick sauce” that nevertheless produces pretty good results all things considered. It’s not my favorite flavor in the world, largely because of how intense and almost sickeningly sweet it is, but it’s passable enough.

This provides an intriguing way to get a hint of that flavor onto whatever it is you’re cooking without drowning the meat in an overpowering sauce. These are chips from actual aging casks, made of oak, that Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 has been kept in awaiting bottling. The chips combine the advantages of oak as an overall reliable smoking wood and alcohol as a well used tool in the arsenal of cooks around the world.

I quite like these smoking chips, though they may not be for everybody. At the price on offer though, you don’t lose too much by giving it a shot and seeing if it’s something you want to work into your repertoire.

Apple wood has long been one of the most preferred smoking woods, and for good reason. It’s sweet, while not too sweet, and imparts a distinctive and immediately recognizable flavor to any smoked meat.

These chips are pretty good at getting that across. It comes in a decent 2 lb bag, and the chips are small and manageable for chucking into any grill, catching easily but burning slowly unlike some of the shavings you might otherwise find floating around.

These are not the highest quality wood chips on the market, but Weber knows how to keep a high base standard of quality while keeping the price low, making this bag a very inexpensive purchase for your smoking hobby.

Obviously this comes with a few caveats; these are only good if you like apple, and you only want apple wood at the moment, but that’s not really a huge flaw to hold against it.

This is a tough one. All of the variety packs at the top of the list have their own merits. While I think Camerons Products has the best blends of wood for what I like to use regularly, the others are just as good in terms of raw quality, the only difference is they provide different flavor options. TO that end, this list is pretty much a 5 way tie for the top spot, since it’s difficult to say any of those are “better” than the others, just different.

The last two are on there as sort of representatives of different things. The Jack Daniel’s wood chips are there as the bets, in my opinion, of the “gimmick wood” that might be artificially flavored or are unusual in some other manner. The Weber chips, meanwhile, represent the best of what I’d consider the “value wood”; it’s decent quality, cheap, and perhaps most importantly: readily available.

All bring something unique to the table, and should be equally considered.