The salad consists of hot smoked duck ham, ground pistachio, beet powder, various microgreens including Lucky Leaf amaranth and micro beet and a white balsamic and pear foam. Everything was packed into a Weck canning jar, smoked and then sealed until opened by our guests at the table. The smoke wafted out after opening and the salad had a great smoky flavor.

I like Weck jars as opposed to others because of the quality…they are just heavier and more sturdy than anything else. I actually dropped one jar in the kitchen without it breaking!

Weck has been around for over a hundred years and helped proliferate the canning movement that was so popular by the time I watched my grandmother can summer vegetables in her kitchen.

To apply the smoke I used the newly redesigned Smoking Gun from Polyscience. The smoking gun is available for about $100 and comes with a couple samples of wood chips including hickory and apple wood (used for this salad). The new design of the gun is far superior to the previous iteration, which had a wooden reservoir for the chips that eventually would deteriorate. The screens are also much easier to access and clean on this model.