Smoke preserved foodstuffs?

I've always dreamed of building a small smoker in order to experiment with both game and livestock. I know of some folks who have purchased commercial smokers both electric and wood powered who have gotten some really nice results out of their use.

Do you have a smoker? Do you use it as much as you'd like?

A video I was watching that inspired the thread follows below.



Share your favorite items to smoke preserve.

I have a smokehouse that my grandfather built by hand, sometime after the 1930s. It still has the rails for sausage smoking at the top. And it still has a rich scent of sweet wood smoke when you disturb the creosote patina on the walls.

The tech was dead simple: a low smoky fire made with specific hardwoods, held at temperature for perhaps a day or more, in an enclosed space.

The smoke added many important preservative elements. And yet, these meats were also soaked in a brine of salt and spices and nitrates -- preservatives all -- prior to smoking. Before refrigeration, this was how it had to be done.

I have a small smoker with an offset firebox.  I bought it many years ago with the idea of smoking fish (probably over a decade now since I've been fishing so that's a clue).  I believe it was last year that I finally started to use it.

All that I definitely remember using it for so far is peppers.  We did that after coming across YouTube videos on paprika and smoked paprika.  So, we've made some of our own smoked paprika and hot smoked paprika.  This year we also used some of the smoked sweet peppers in making BBQ sauce for the first time - it's a bit thinner than most commercial products, but tasty...we may never purchase BBQ sauce again.

I do have a brisket in the freezer in the country, but I think it may be too large to fit inside the smoker.  I also need to pay attention as the offset fire box can throw flames into the smoker portion if I'm using wood and a bit careless (I burned a couple peppers this year).

I was just looking into building a stand alone cold smoke box. We have access to clean organic pork and i love bacon. I would live to hear about peoples experience keeping the smoke going.

I recently found out that what I thought was a potting shed next to my garage was in fact a smoke house. I look forward to trying it someday.

A new video came across my feed that I thought others might be interested in. A mixture of instruction and history makes this an easy to watch flick.

Thanks Timothy.  This is a channel that I enjoy - they have such a variety of skills from pioneer days that they demonstrate, including many that would qualify for a Badge Bit.

My favourite is smoked salmon, and smoked cheses are good too.  Those smoked peppers above sound intriguing as well.

Mmm, smoked salmon. My ex in-laws gave us some smoked sturgeon once. That was incredible. It was a 2-meter fish from the Columbia River.

My grandpa used an old refrigerator that he hollowed all of the plastic gick out of. Thinking on it that must have been a pretty old refrigerator.... or my memories wrong and he had lined it with some sort of tin. But he hooked a tube up to it and made a fire box so only the smoke would go into the refrigerator. We had all kinds of sausages and smoked things from it. He is a waste not want not kind of guy so if he killed it we ate it. From opossum and foxes to porcupines and bears. Ill have to ask him what he soaked it in or if he soaked it in any preservatives. But we used it all the time! Now days I'm border line vegetarian so we just started smoking cheese and pizza in a hot smoker. But I bet smoked dried veggies would be pretty good to...
Think of smoking like baking or canning. The first dozen times you have to get over the learning curve so then it gets easy and not intimidating. Otherwise it will just sit and never get used cause its a new skill. Getting or making one with a couple recipes really boiling over in your head is the best idea. Give it a couple of months of dedication. Or better yet get a friend into it at the same time. Competitively smoking and exchanging ideas on how to incorporate it into your everyday food stuff is a great way to make sure it doesn't get left on a back burner and never used.