• At least an hour before smoking – but ideally overnight – soak your wood chips in water.
• Measure your seasoning of choice into a shallow dish.
• Remove foil from cream cheese, place in dish, and turn to coat with the seasoning. You’ll want to press it into the brick of cream cheese, so it adheres well.
• At this point, you can wrap it in plastic wrap to smoke later, or proceed with smoking:

Smoking Cream Cheese

• Preheat your smoker to 200 F.

  Note: While it’s pretty standard to fill your smoker’s water pan with hot water, we did NOT - opting to dry smoke.
• Get your smoker going and the smoke... stabilized.

  You don’t want to put the cream cheese in during the initial strong white smoke, you want the lower intensity, almost wispy smoke for this.

  Heavy white smoke tends to cause a lot of soot, in our experience. Sooty cream cheese is not tasty cream cheese!
• Take a large piece of heavy duty aluminum foil and fashion a small rimmed tray out of it. Make one for each brick of cream cheese you will be smoking.
• Place your block of cream cheese on the foil tray, spray with a bit of cooking spray - this will help the smoke “cling” to the cream cheese.
• Use a sharp knife to carefully score cream cheese with a crosshatch pattern. I aim to cut about ½" down into the top of the cheese.
• Hot smoke the cream cheese at 200 F for 2 hours, or until it reaches the desired doneness / smoke level.

  Your cook time will vary wildly based on your smoker and your preferences.
• We like to check on them right around the 1 hour mark.

  For our smoker, we use 2 big handfuls of wood chips at a time, adding more chips after about 30 minutes.
• Serve hot, or cool to room temperature and chill in an airtight container until use.