Some hot smoking advice required

[bugg_tb]

Hello folks,

I'm sure I'm about the 1000th person to swing by asking for hot smoking help, so I apologise in advance.

I've decided to tinker with hot smoking and built a home made smoker out of a gas hob and galvanised bin (apologies to those who probably think thats the absolute worst way to start )

Anyway, so I need to burn wood on it, and I bought a small smoking box to put wood chips in, and fired it up, it gets nice and warm and creates plenty of smoke so I'm not especially worried about that part.

My question is, when I look at recipes for meat and stuff, the smoking time can be hours and hours, so when a wood box stops creating smoke, do I replace the wood until the time is up, leave it, or am I just doing it wrong and should splash out on something the pros made?

Thanks

Tom

[dobba1988]

Hello folks,

I'm sure I'm about the 1000th person to swing by asking for hot smoking help, so I apologise in advance.

I've decided to tinker with hot smoking and built a home made smoker out of a gas hob and galvanised bin (apologies to those who probably think thats the absolute worst way to start )

Anyway, so I need to burn wood on it, and I bought a small smoking box to put wood chips in, and fired it up, it gets nice and warm and creates plenty of smoke so I'm not especially worried about that part.

My question is, when I look at recipes for meat and stuff, the smoking time can be hours and hours, so when a wood box stops creating smoke, do I replace the wood until the time is up, leave it, or am I just doing it wrong and should splash out on something the pros made?

Thanks

Tom

Hi tom

welcome to the forum.

Typically when hot smoking meat will only absorb wood smoke for the first two hours so it is essential for you to keep wood chips going for that long.
Alternately look into buying wood chunks or logs and just placing them directly onto your coals. These will smoulder and produce smoke at lease 5 times longer than little woodchips.

Smoking times however do take hours for food to cook so your going to want a constant low and slow heat from your smoker. If your home made one can allow you that...then well done. However if your replacing coal every hour or so its going to get very expensive very quick for you. Especially on the bigger cooks ie butt and brisket.

Hope this helps a little
Marc

[JEC]

Can I recommend you find an alternative to the galvanised bin. You are running a serious risk of zinc poisoning using this setup. Your friends and family won't thank you for the extra flavouring in the food... Probably not what you wanted to hear but better safe than sorry

[Kiska95]

I Know its a bit late but I just built 2 UDS's cost very little and I live in Sunderland too so give me a PM and I will tell you all about them.

Where in Sunderland are you at?