Smoking Foods
Smoking Food
We will write you up some articles in the coming weeks to help you understand what you can do in the domestic environment to smoke and preserve your own foods.
However, as a taster, Smoking Food probably be split into three categories :
- Cold Smoking : can be regarded as a completely separate activity to barbecuing, e.g. cold smoked salmon. Let's face it with the heat source underneath, a barbecue will never be cold. This typically needs do be done over a long period of time ... many hours.
- Hot Smoking : For example, hot smoked chicken, duck, 'kiln' hot smoked salmon. These are done relatively quickly and can be accomplished on an suitable barbecue with a hood to trap the smoke
- 'American' Barbecue : The true barbecue isn't a case throwing of a slab of meat or a few sausages on to grill and eat them within 30 minutes ... that's just grilling. The real barbecue is where the meat is marinated long and slow in a barbecue sauce of your choice and is then slowly cooked over the course of several hours and slathered with the marinade on an ongoing basis to keep the meat succulent and moist inside until it is so sofy and yeilding that you can pull it apart with a spoon.
If you want to cold smoke (1) , then you need to have a separate smoke generator that keeps the heat source away from the food otherwise it WILL start to cook spoiling your intended results.
For American traditional barbecue, the BBQ Store recommends the Bradley Smoker shown below. The Bradley Smoker comes with two units ... a smoke generator that electrically slow burns compressed pellets of wood (available in different flavours) of your choice releasing a very controlled smoke. This generator in turn fits to a cabinet not dissimilar in size and shape to a domestic under counter refrigerator in which tou can place huge amounts of food to smoke.
The Bradley Smoker cabinet comes fitted with a heating element which can be controlled between ~60 to ~160 Celcius for delicious slow barbecue racks, ribs and joints.
If you do wish to cold smoke with the Bradley Smoker, then it is possible, but in our experience you need to bring the temperature down by isolating the heated generator from the smoke cabinet. Bradley are launching a separate cooling chamber, but you can simulate this very effectively by fitting the gerator to a box and running a tumble dryer hose (kept exclusively for this purpose!!) between the box and the smoker cabinet.
For our money, if you want to both cold smoke and also try out real Ammerican slow cook barbecue, then the Bradley Smoker is a must.