DIY Cold Smokers

Cold smoking is used to impart a smoky flavor to all sorts of foods without actually cooking them, most frequently bacon, cheeses, ham, sausage, fish (especially salmon), pork chops, chicken, beef and scallops. Basically, wood smoke is used in an enclosure with the food or ingredients to be smoked for a short period, generally at temperatures of no greater than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Smoking is not intended to cook the foods or ingredients in question, merely to impart flavor, but as an effect of cold smoking the foods usually take on a darker color while maintaining a moist texture.

As you can probably see from this description, it doesn't take tremendously sophisticated hardware to do cold smoking. While industrial food companies do use large and very sophisticated processes for their commercial products, cold smoking can be done at home relatively simply, and many DIY enthusiasts from all over have come up with their own creative rigs for doing so.

Probably the most simple and ghetto-fab of the bunch is the Trash Can Cold Smoker. Designed by smoking enthusiast Nick Dawson, the advantage to this one is that the main components are simply a steel trash can and a terracotta pot, so they'll blend into most backyards fairly naturally. You might even have the needed equipment lying around already! The Trash Can Cold Smoker costs about $70 in parts and requires only basic hand tools to put together. Wood is burned in the pot, the smoke travels to the trash can which contains the meat via a sealed-off dryer hose, and then another snip of dryer hose is used as a vent from the garbage can. And who said you should never eat out of the trash!

A simpler model cooked up by Youtuber Wil Brewer involves even less in parts and labor, but at a much smaller size. Wil uses an empty tin can (with the lid still attached), a soldering iron to heat the base and smoker pellets in the can to provide the smoke. This tiny rig is optimized for smoking one block of cheese at a time.

If you happen to have a Weber kettle, Youtube comes to the rescue again with a video of user Dave Scarpetti's conversion of it to a cold smoker. Some helpful comments in the video thread suggest possible improvements to make it even more efficient. Along similar lines, here's instructions on how to convert a Weber Bullet to cold smokery.

Mother Earth News' "Oil Drum Handcraft" article contains a number of interesting projects, including a conversion of an oil drum to a cold smoker. You can really manage to convert any sort of sealed metal enclosure to do the trick, as long as you rig up a heat source and venting. It's been done with old refrigerators or conversions of grills and hot smokers just to name a few.

Once you've figured out how you want to DIY, the last choice is that of wood to use for smoke flavor. The traditional and not too expensive choices are mesquite and hickory chips, but there's a wide variety of possibilities including oak, maple, pecan, even apple and cherry tree wood. Apparently some producers of ham and bacon smoke by using burning corncobs, at least according to Wikipedia's page on smoking. Whatever you choose, good luck and happy smoking!