Food

Cold-Smoked Cheese (Brick or String)

By Ryan Hurd · Published Aug 6, 2026

This is one of my favorite low-effort projects on the pellet smoker. Cold smoking cheese doesn't require any actual cooking -- just smoke, time, and a little patience -- and it works well with pretty much any harder cheese you have on hand. String cheese is my go-to since I usually do a big batch of around 100 pieces at once, but parmesan, cheddar, and asiago all pick up smoke flavor beautifully too. The two keys to getting this right: keep the smoker itself off (the pellet tubes provide all the smoke you need without adding heat), and give the cheese some breathing room above the tubes so it doesn't take on enough residual heat to soften and drip. Beyond that, it's mostly hands-off -- light the tubes, let them smoke for a few hours, then bag everything up and forget about it for a month. You don't even need an actual smoker for this. A couple of aluminum foil pans clipped together, with a grate set inside and some holes poked through for airflow, will get you the same result -- the pellet tube is doing all the work regardless, so a real smoker is just a convenient container, not a requirement. That resting period is what really makes the difference. Straight out of the smoker, the smoke flavor sits mostly on the surface. After a month sealed up with its own smoke juices, it's worked all the way through the cheese.