Fish Products and Byproducts Technology

Unit 4 - Fish preservation by smoking

4.5. Components of smoke
Smoke is an emulsion of droplets in a continuous phase of air and vapours stabilized by electrostatic charges on the droplets. For flavouring, colouring and microbistatic purposes, the vapours are of greatest importance in smoking.
When wood smoke is diluted by air, the concentration of the more volatile phenols falls to a greater extent than that of the non-volatile phenols. Within the temperature range 30-80^oC, which covers all of the cold smoking process and most of the hot smoking process, adsorption of smoke vapours was independent of temperature, while deposition or absorption of the non-volatile phenols increased with temperature.