Let me introduce you to the newest member of the Abahachi household: Pat (named after my late father-in-law). Pat may look like a galvanised dustbin with a few holes in it, but this is actually my new smoker, in which I put to work the skills and knowledge acquired at a course last week (birthday present from Mrs Abahachi). So far I have smoked bacon, salmon, chicken, scallops (delicious), mackerel, cheese and salt; in this picture you can see Pat smoking some haddock for next weekend’s kedgeree, and at some point I plan to smoke some malt so that I can make Rauchbier. And if you come to the West Country Social – looking like mid-September, but there’s plenty of time still to register your availability – you’ll be able to sample some of Pat’s products, plus my home-produced cider, beer, bread, apple juice…
Sounds yummy! Please can a sample some of the smoked cheese? I could bring chutney to the social to complement it!
Wish i could make it. I absolutely love smoked foods, must be my GErmanic background.
What kind of wood do you use? I’m partial to hickory and applewood.
So far, oak dust for cold smoking (sourced from a neighbour who does a lot of woodwork) and apple from the garden for hot smoking. At some point I have some cherry to play with as well.
You could offer to smoke some of those locally produced organic west country cheeses and go into business at your local farmers markets.
(Don’t think I can come to the social, sadly. I checked out the trains to yours from here. I’d get there at 12:38 and have to catch one back at exactly 8 minutes later!)
that looks great……I was thinking of building myself a rudimentary barbecue for the summer, but now I like the look of a smoker!
Does it have some special equipment inside or is it just a bin?!
At the top there are a couple of removable metal rods on which I can rest a grill salvaged from an old barbecue, or a baking tray.
Inside, it depends what sort of smoking I’m doing. For hot smoking, I put in a small bucket-style barcecue and then, once it’s properly lit, dump a load of wood chips on top, but it would be perfectly possible just to put in a layer of sand and then have the charcoal directly on top of that. For cold smoking, I must admit that I’ve invested in a cunning gizmo that ensures that the wood dust doesn’t burn up too quickly, but I imagine it would be possible to lay out a trail of wood dust and light one end to get the same effect.
Sounds like a lot of fun….but perhaps too complicated for my limited capabilities…..I may stick to the classic barbecue for now…
I’ve just bought a bin to make the same device. I googled it for some tips and came up with lots of comments on Cancer from the Zinc in the galvanisation. These comments are all from the US not the UK. Did you look into this as I have to admit I’m a bit concerned.
Yes, I did look at this, briefly, and chose to ignore it. Clearly there have never been any actual studies of whether using a galvanised dustbin as a smoker increases your risk of cancer, and my experience is that the inside of the bin is very quickly covered in a layer of soot and grease, so the zinc is sealed inside. Worth remembering, if you are worried about such things, that there *are* some more or less credible studies that suggest eating smoked foods in large quantities gives you an increased risk of cancer; the hypothetical additional risk from the galvanisation seems to me to be pretty irrelevant. I’d put this, in the absence of further evidence, in the same class as people who are afraid of catching cancer from their laptops, and also wonder whether it’s partly promoted by people who want to sell us expensive purpose-built smokers. It is, after all, amazing that any of our ancestors survived eating all that food smoked in their own chimneys…
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