Wood smoke vs. Grease smoke

Botch

Cook's Illustrated did an interesting recipe development, Beef Tenderloin on a Grill with plenty of "grilled" flavor.  They talked about the grilled flavor in food coming from the drippings off the food hitting the charcoal and burning, creating its own specific smoke; on my old Weber the grease would hit what they called "Flavorizer Bars", to the same effect.  They also said the fats from meat creates much more of this flavoring smoke than the juice, although they didn't explain how they determined that.
They ran into two problems: first, the tenderloin had to be placed either away from the coals, or over an inoperative burner, or it would cook too fast/uneven (so the drippings wouldn't hit the coals/bars and burn); secondly a beef tenderloin doesn't have much fat in it to begin with.  Their solution?  They stacked up three slices of bacon, and threaded them onto a skewer, accordion-style; this bacon lump was placed on the edge of the coals so it wouldn't burn up too fast, and created enough "grease smoke" to flavor the tenderloin.  
I don't do too many beef tenderloin$, but do pork 'loins quite often, and I want to try this (I can also see a chance to use my "half-stone", which I haven't used yet (giving me indirect heat for the loin and direct for the bacon).  
 
They still weren't satisfied with the browning, so they rubbed the loin with 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp each of black pepper, oil, and baking soda!  The soda raises the pH of the meat and allows the Mallard Maynard browning reaction to occur more easily.  I haven't heard of this before; I've used a light sprinkling of sugar (white, brown, turbinado, even honey and agave nectar) on things like fish to increase browning, but never heard of baking soda.  Something to try this weekend if it warms up a bit.   

YukonRon

I am curious to see how that would work out. The baking soda would make sense, however, I use sugars more for tenderizing, do you think the soda would counter-act that process?

Botch

UPDATE.
Tried cooking a pork loin today with the above technique.  It was raining so I got to use my new SmokeWare cap for what I bought it for, very happy with it! (note to Self: gin up a waterproof container for your wireless thermometer, so you can use it in the rain too).  I could've swore I had a half-stone, but it was a full, pizza-like stone, so I tried the setup below; platesetter leg's-up, skewered bacon slices on a metal skewer and propped it between the platesetter and one of its legs, then the pork on top.  I rubbed the left third of the loin with the oil/baking soda mixture (marked with a toothpick), the center third I sprinkled with sugar, and the right third I left plain.  
 

 
 Very hard to see in the photograph, the soda and sugar thirds showed a very slight bit of extra color, but not enough to make it worth the trouble.  A pork tenderloin cooks much faster than a beef loin, guess it didn't really have time to brown much at all.  
The bacon was thoroughly cooked, and the grease dripping off onto the platesetter did burn and smoke.  The remaining bacon wasn't burned up so I pulled it and chopped it fine for my salad; I'll never use Bac-Os again.  
 

  
Plated, sorry about the blurriness, something on my camera is just not set right.  Pork was perfect, juicy, but didn't taste very "grilled" at all (I normally do a pork loin raised-direct, they usually have a better crust than this).  I will try this recipe again with a beef tenderloin, but for pork the bacon/soda steps just aren't worth the trouble.  
 

 
Thanks for looking!  
 
EDIT:  Oh yeah, I almost didn't have anything to show you.  Patio was covered with wet leaves and one shoe flew out from under me, almost tossed the damn thing!  

SGH

Great looking grub brother Botch. 

Foghorn

Nice report - and grub.  Thanks for posting.