Help me choose a smoker

Adding in love for the Big Green Egg.

One word of caution: When you look at them, you’ll pick a size and think “That’s plenty big enough. I’ll never need a bigger one.”

When you do that, go at least one size up. :wink:

People have mentioned how long it can smoke for how much time? I’ve done a 15-ish hour smoke at about 220-ish with no problem with one load of charcoal. The thing holds heat in incredibly well (which means that it’s also great to use in the winter).

In the Chicago area, there’s a number of places that sell split wood. It’s about $20 for an 1/8 of a cord. Chicago Firewood (1300 N. Division, Chicago, IL) sells White Oak, Hickory, Apple, Cherry, Maple, and perhaps some others I’m forgetting at the moment, for around that price.

An eight of a cord, for how I smoke, last for a couple of years.

+1

No, it’s not the cheapest, but you’ll hand it down to your kid, and he will too.

Portable? No, it’s not 18 pounds, but if you’re set on tailgating in a big way, look at the tables, and put some small pneumatic casters on it and you can roll even an XL onto your small utility trailer along with all your other gear.

Or, build your own table - they have plans - and put these wheelson & you’re pretty mobile.

Whoops. 1300 N. Halsted, just one block north of Division.

Okay, I’ll be the one who posts it:

Have you seen the smoker Alton Brown makes out of ceramic flower pots for around $100? I haven’t made on of these, but my brother has and swears by it. AB uses an electric coil burner to heat wood chips, but I guess you could use a propane burner as well. Portability-wise, I guess it’d be great.

I grill more than I smoke, so I might be willing to pony up the cash to try this before I’d invest in a “real” ceramic smoker.

I worked out the cost a few years back and the cost of Alton’s smoker (plus the cost running that stupid burner for 2-3 days*, plus figuring my time at say $20/hour to build the stupid thing was more expensive than buying something like this. (And if you’re just using the hot-plate to make the wood smoulder, it’s not a ceramic smoker. The charcoal burning at low temps is part of the process.) What Brown has made is an electric smoker out of a hunk of ceramic.
*Actually, it kinda makes sense if he was going to use it to cold-smoke stuff. Get a piece of ductwork, wrap it in a damp towel and you have a cheap offset smoker so he could cold-smoker-That’d be worth it as offset cold-smokers can be pricey, but as a hot-smoker, it’s a huge waste of time.

and since they’re ceramic, probably not a good choice for tailgating.
But if it were for home use… heck yeah. the green egg is the way to go.

We’ve had an electric Brinkman for years and it works well enough; we’re due for a new one because the water bowl finally rusted through. Local fire codes prohibit open flames within a certain distance from the building and our balcony is smaller than that distance so electric is the only way for us to cook outside unless we walk up to the park.

Nothing really to add to the smoker debate, but I see that the OP mentioned wanting to smoke brisket AND bacon -

Smoking bacon - at least in the way that I’ve always understood that phrase to mean: “as part of the curing process that turns pig belly into bacon” - is a cold-smoke process, which operates at lower temperatures than you can get using a generic “smoker”. The latter are designed for “hot smoking” - slow cooking at between 225 to 275 degrees.

To get smoke to the temperature required for cold smoking, you typically have a heat source separated from the meat by some kind of piping so that the smoke that reaches the meat has cooled to around 80 - 100 degrees.

at 225 I’d expect all the fat to render out of a slab of bacon and leave tiny shreds of meat sitting on a grill, unless the fat overwhelmed the water bath and created a hell of a grease fire first!

You can hot-smoke bacon to to very good results. It takes only about 1-2 hours.

pulykamell.

I don’t believe you. Pics or it didn’t happen.

:wink:

(In other words: Recipe please??? Pretty please???))

Pics?

Curing.
Smoking.
Close-up.

And some homemade (unsmoked) cured pancetta as a bonus.

You can dry-cure or wet-cure bacon. You can cold-smoke or hot-smoke bacon. I went dry-cure, cold smoke.

The basic cure:
1 pound kosher salt
1/2 pound sugar
2 ounces pink salt (Prague Powder #1)
Any spices you may want

You’ll only need about 1/4 cup or so of this for a 5 pound pork belly. Coat your pork belly thoroughly with enough cure to cover the entire surface. Place in ziploc bag. Put in fridge. Make sure that as the moisture is drawn out of the meat, that it covers the pork belly as good as possible to ensure an even cure. I flip my bacon every day.

After 7 days, check to see if it’s firm. If it’s not, leave it in for another day or two, but it should be firmed up by then, depending on the thickness of the belly. Rinse all the cure off, pat dry, and smoke to an internal temp of 150. You can serve this hot, or let it cool, slice, and fry up like you normally would fry up bacon. It is delish.

BTW, you want Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn’s “Charcuterie,” which is where this recipe comes from. I have brasaola hanging in my basement at the moment, and tomorrow I’m stuffing a cured salami-type sausage into casings that should be ready to eat in about 5-6 weeks.

Thanks for the info! I didn’t know that hot-smoke was an option for curing/preserving - all the resources I’d gotten my information from painted it as a hot = cook, cold = cure system.

I don’t think you’ll get something shelf-stable after hot smoking. The book itself says to use the hot-smoked bacon within a week or freeze it. It’s easy enough to slice and freeze for later use.

That said, I’ve kept it in my fridge for three weeks or so and ate it without killing myself, but I don’t think that’s the correct way to do it if you want to preserve it long-term.

I saw a great idea for a jerry-rigged cold smoker that I have to try soon. You buy yourself a cheap $5 soldering iron, get yourself a soup can (or similar) and cut it open, but not quite all the way (so the lid is still attached.) Cut a hole into the top of the can big enough so the soldering iron’s tip could fit. You fill the can with wood chips, stick the soldering iron in it, close it, plug in the iron, and voila, a smoke generator. I would think that stuck in a WSM or kettle or cabinet or whatnot, that should be plenty cool enough to cold smoke.

edit: Here’s a video in case my instructions are not clear. I might try this tomorrow with some cured sausages I’m going to stuff.

Holy crap! That looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing! :slight_smile:

What’s “pink salt”?

It’s a salt used for curing that’s been dyed pink to prevent confusion with regular salt. It usually refers to a mix of salt and sodium nitrite, although salt and sodium nitrate is also dyed pink. The nitrite is referred to as Prague Powder #1 and the nitrate is Prague Powder #2 or Insta-Cure #2, or a variety of other names. Basically, you use the nitrite (#1) for short cures (a month or under) like bacon, pancetta, or guanciale, and you use the nitrate (#2) for longer (>a month) cures like salami, bresaola, etc. The nitrate acts like a time-release version of the nitrite. Basically, sodium nitrate breaks down to sodium nitrite over time, hence the reason for using the nitrate over long periods of time.

I mean, I went dry cure, hot smoke.

It’s a fun hobby. I highly recommend picking up that book (Here, I’ll link it for you) if you’re at all interested in sausage-making and cured products. It’s a lot of fun, and I know I’ve seen threads here on the Straight Dope about it before.

Too bad The Little House In the Big Woods isn’t in public domain yet, or I’d go over to Project Gutenberg and dig up Pa Ingalls’s method for making a smoker out of an old dead tree.

If you have to ask…

Um, I have a smoker that I bought at Home Depot for around $150. I have made many a BBQ on this. It is awesome, and very traditional, and all you need.

I am amazed that the entire Home Depot site is down at this moment. As an out of work IT guy, I want to cockpunch the losers at Home Depot IT. They probably are under 30 and have a four year degree in CS. Thanks a lot, fuckheads. If you didn’t suck, I could provide a link and maybe make your damn company some money. Whatever.

Nevertheless, a simple smoker form Home Despot should do you fine.