Vegetables & Barbeque?

Thinking about how fruits & vegetables react to low-and-slow indoor cooking, I think any fruit/veg with a high moisture content would reduce to a puddle of (possibly very tasty) goo in that time. (Except tender leaves -- those would reduce to a slick of nasty slime.) Harder things (potatoes, roots, winter squash) may hold up better. I think you'd better perform some experiments & report back on the results!

I don't know why you're thinking of doing it but I wouldn't think it'd work well because they'd like, just reduce to mush, but also, if it's for veg*s, I'd be very wary.

I'd have a lot of questions before I'd consume that, if it survived.

As a life long vegetarian, I not had any vegetables cooked that way that actuly tasted very good . As has been pointed out , root veg can be baked , but baked potato at a barbecue sounds odd to me . Barbecue is a meat thing, with the meat substitute for the veggies. Slow cooking in a pit is often done in Italy , sometimes the pit is filled in with sand . But I have only seen meat being dug up.

I have heard of potatoes being buried and cooked -- like wrapped in foil and buried right by a fire pit to cook for hours -- as part of camping trips. Apparently that works well? Not what the OP meant but I've heard that's a thing.

At clam-bakes, apparently, corn-on-the-cob, potatoes, carrots and onions are cooked in the clam-pit, which suggests 'low and slow'. FWIW.

Clam bakes are indeed low and slow, compared to cooking on the stove, but also (1) basically steaming, not smoking, and (2) don't have such long cooking time compared to real barbecue -- lobsters & clams, the stars of the show, would turn to rubber if you treated them like barbecue meats. If your clam bake comes out tasting smoked, you've been doing it wrong.

So, dutch ovens to keep moisture in aren't included in this question?

RedRajah said:

I'm not talking grilling. I'm talking low & slow in the smoker or pit for several hours. Can it be done and, if so, which vegetables (or fruits) could be adapted to it?

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I've had smoked cabbage and loved it. Smoked taters came out a bit dry and over-cooked. They cooked kinda funny and the extensive time did something weird with the starch so they almost had a "reheated" quality to them.

If you smoke tomatoes on a sheet pan, then use them in pasta, it adds a ton of flavor and a little bit goes a long ways. The same is true for eggplant. You can make a wonderful pasta sauce with smoked tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, and garlic.

There's a restaurant I've seen on tv that uses smoked tomatoes in their salad dressing. That sounded like something I need to try as well.

I'd like to use some smoked eggplant in baba ganoush one day.

I wouldn't smoke a fruit, but now I'm wondering how awesome it would be to smoke a pineapple and use it in ice cream.

As somebody already pointed out, you'll want something that is sturdy, or you'll need to have a hard smoke with lower heat for a short period of time. Otherwise, you'll just end up with mush. Mush can be useful, depending upon the recipe, though.

TedTheewen said:

I'd like to use some smoked eggplant in baba ganoush one day.

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There's a restaurant near me that makes a very smoky baba ganoush -- yummy. I don't think you have to put it in a smoker or bbq pit to get that, though -- a serious charring over the grill seems to do the trick. Eggplant is so porous, the smoke flavor permeates the whole thing pretty quickly.