Milk, meat, mushrooms: is there anything that can't be smoked?

In a smokebox fashioned from a deep covered metal tray and a rack, Matthew McCool is smoking shiitake mushrooms over hay.

They're destined to add a complementary earthy note to a dish of barramundi with kombu seaweed and mussel foam, served at Altitude on the 36th floor of Sydney's Shangri-La Hotel.

“I bugged my fruit and veg supplier to get us in some hay,” says Altitude's chef de cuisine. “We got the biggest bale, so we do loads of things over hay – Persian feta, butter that we use in desserts, smoked oil that we put into a potato foam ... It's quite strong and grassy, different to woodchips, which can sometimes get bitter.”

Smoking sessions take place first thing in the morning. “It does smell out the whole kitchen,” says McCool. “You'd want to keep it away from the pastry area.”

Cooks have long known that smoke adds a savoury flavour to rich meats such as salmon, bacon and duck. But 2013 may go down as the year Australian chefs took up smoking everything else as well.

Out the back of Rockwell & Sons, on Melbourne's hip Smith Street, co-owner and chef Casey Wall has rigged up a hot smoker using welded steel and “hillbilly ingenuity”.

The North Carolina native grew up on southern-style barbecue – the kind where the fire's lit at 5am and allowed to die down to coals before a whole butterflied pig is slowly cooked and tended throughout the day before being served around 4pm, chopped up so everyone gets a mixture of crisp, smoky outside pieces and the succulent meat within.

In Collingwood, he's getting creative with his home-made smokehouse. “We've made ricotta and a couple of other fresh cheeses with smoked milk, and we've smoked rye flour to make bread. We've smoked potatoes, butter, cream – we're just really playing around with it.

“If we're smoking pork, we try to keep the chamber around 103C. But once the coals are on their way out, we put something like yoghurt or cheese in there and let it hang out for a few minutes. They're high-fat items and smoke clings to fat really well, so it doesn't need to be done for very long.”

Ryan Squires, chef and owner of Brisbane's only three-hat restaurant, Esquire, has experimented with cooking over wallaby droppings he collected from the pristine greens of the Gold Coast's Sanctuary Cove golf course.

“It was a neutral smoke, very grassy, like when you're driving down the highway and there's been a bushfire recently.”

But dung-smoked dishes haven't made it to the menu. Instead, Squires is cold smoking ingredients such as parsley for a puree he serves with Murray cod, and almonds, which he turns into smoked almond milk to serve with mountain goat lomo (shaved, dry-cured meat) and potato. “The smoked almond milk is gorgeous – it's subtle and silky.”

Canadian-born Tom Cooper ran a smoked salmon business for almost 30 years, starting as an importer before deciding he could do a better job himself with Tasmanian salmon.

Over the years he's tried every imaginable ingredient, marinade and combustible combination – including burning allspice, cumin and fennel seeds to smoke lamb, and smoking prawns over dried shrimps and wood.

But he draws the line at chocolate – “I just don't think that smoking chocolate is on” – and isn't a fan of eucalyptus smoke (“too strong”), liquid smoke or plug-in smoking guns, which he says burn too hot and produce harsh smoke flavours.

Five years ago, after an unsuccessful international search for a compact, easy-to-use cold-smoker, he gave up the salmon-smoking business to develop his own appliance.

Designed from scratch, the Tom Cooper Kold Smoker is being used by chefs such as MoVida's Frank Camorra and Peter Gilmore at Quay. The unit, about the size of a minibar fridge, has a smoking chamber in which wood, herbs and spices can be burnt, and a refrigerator above.

Paddock-to-plate exponent Annie Smithers, from Du Fermier in central Victoria, recently bought one of the units, mostly to smoke ocean trout.

“But what it's allowing us to do is experiment with stuff that's coming out of the garden. At this time of year we're serving smoked ocean trout with smoked chive flowers. It's tiny little stuff, and some people might notice it and some people might not, but it just adds another dimension.”

Over summer Smithers will be “poking all manner of things into the smoker to see what the results are” – tomatoes, garlic for aioli – as well as burning applewood from her own trees to see what flavours it imparts.

Martin Benn, from Sydney three-hat restaurant Sepia, has recently been experimenting with hot-smoked jellies. “We make a dashi using kelp, then season the stock with soy sauce and mirin. Then we place this in a shallow tray and hot smoke for 20 minutes.”

The process heightens the umami taste of the smoked dashi, which Benn serves with seared bonito.

“We have also smoked macadamia nuts and miso eggplant, which is a really interesting flavour,” he says.

Indigenous smoking ceremonies and Australian barbecues have inspired some of the dishes at Melbourne's Vue de Monde, says head chef Cory Campbell.

A meal on the 55th-floor dining room might begin with appetisers of emu jerky served in smoking gum leaves, or salmon pearls delicately smoked over tea-tree, and end with tonka bean souffle and chocolate ice-cream, cold-smoked with coconut husk and brought to the table under a glass cloche capturing some of the smoke.

Campbell says smoke can take a dish in a new direction. “Not every dish needs smoke – not every ingredient needs smoke – but if you're looking for a bit of earthiness, smoking can add that.”

Hot and cold smoking

Hot smoking imparts flavour to meat and fish while simultaneously cooking and curing it. It has traditionally been used to preserve things such as herring (kippers), eel, pork and jerky for times when meat and fish were in short supply. Other hot-smoked ingredients include peppers for paprika and lapsang souchong tea leaves.

Cold smoking involves flavouring ingredients with smoke without applying direct heat. Smoke is piped in from a separate chamber to flavour ingredients kept below 30 degrees. This method is used for foods such as cheese, ham, bacon, trout and salmon, which are usually brined or cured first.

Smoke gets in your food

Other dishes (and drinks) featuring smoked ingredients:

Quay, Sydney: fragrant poached chicken, white radish, sea scallops, pea blossoms, smoked white eggplant cream, virgin black sesame oil.

MoVida Melbourne and Sydney: artisan Cantabrian anchovy with smoked tomato sorbet.

Zeta bar, Sydney: black pepper smoked old-fashioned (cedar-smoked bourbon, orange, Angostura bitters and sugar, finished with a mist of black pepper essence).

Bar Ampere, Melbourne: mezcal old-fashioned cocktail made with hickory-smoked agave.

Provenance, Beechworth: pork cheek cooked in hay, blood pudding, crisp pork skin, coriander and grain salad (made with smoked pork stock).

Pope Joan, Melbourne: smoked plate of Spanish mackerel, nasturtium, mustard fruits and labneh.

Cumulus Up, Melbourne: crudites, smoked goat's milk yoghurt.