Ed Epstein - Build a Smokehouse

Some of the most mouth-watering, epicurean delights in gourmet stores are smoked hams, breasts of turkey, pheasants, eels, salmon, whitefish, and trout. These delicacies are also very, very expensive, and most of us buy them in miniscule amounts for special occasions. But if you have your own smokehouse, you can enjoy these luxuries and dozens of superbly flavored foods from smoked homemade sausages, venison, beef, and lamb, to wild game birds, clams, oysters, shrimp, squid, and freshwater fish. If you fish or hunt or farm livestock, your costs will be a fraction of what you might pay at the delicatessen counter. But there are other sound reasons for building a smokehouse and smoking your own products.

If you raise your own poultry, porkers, or bullpout, curing and smoking is yet another way to preserve the meat, far more delicious than freezing or canning it.

People with smokehouses tend to raise stock themselves, especially for smoking, giving them great independence and self-sufficiency. Range-fed chickens or turkeys hatched in the spring, then killed in late autumn, cured, and smoked at home, are a very inexpensive form of protein.

A smokehouse can be a community resource that draws rural neighbors together and motivates more people to raise their own meat animals. If you build a smokehouse, share it with others. You can barter the use of your smokehouse for smoker hardwood or a share of the finished meat.

Much fish and game, hard-won from river and field, go to waste because they are poorly prepared or unappealing to our overcivilized palates. Smoking mellows and enriches the flavor as well as preserves the meat. Once you have learned the techniques of smoking, you can rig up a simple smokehouse on a fishing or hunting trip and preserve your catch in the field.

In recent years dozens of commercial smokers have appeared on the market, most of them expensive, hard to clean, and none of them more efficient than a homemade smoker. You can make a simple smoke box or barrel that works very well, or you can build a strong, tight smokehouse that will endure for decades. In southern hog-raising country, smokehouses a century old are still doing service.

Smoking is an ancient food preservation technique that probably goes back to the first delighted efforts of human beings to cook meat and fish over fire. Smoking lowers the moisture content of food and seals the exterior with a hard, golden-brown film; the complex chemical reactions between the smoke, the meat protein, and the internal moisture inhibit the growth of undesirable microorganisms. The temperature of the heated air that accompanies the smoke, the construction and venting of the smoker, the length of time the meat is exposed to the heat and smoke, as well as the slightly different flavors given off by various woods, all contribute to the unique tastes, textures, and keeping qualities of each smoked food product. Although early adventures with smoking your own foods can give highly variable results, eventually you learn how long, what wood, and what temperatures with what foods suit your palate best.

Early people discovered that brining or curing meat in a salt solution before smoking it removed more moisture from the protein tissue and greatly enhanced both the preservative characteristics and the flavor of the meat. Over the centuries, three basic ways of curing and/or smoking meats, fish, and poultry have been perfectedhot smoking, cold smoking, and curing and smoking.

Hot smoking is a fairly rapid process that both cooks the meat and flavors it with smoke at the same time. The reason steaks and fish cooked over an open campfire taste so memorably good is because they are crudely hot smoked. The slower the hot smoking process, the more intense the flavor. Hot smoking temperatures range from 85F to 250F. The delicious foods prepared this way should be eaten right away or kept under refrigeration less than a week.

Cold smoking is a long, slow process that can last weeks with temperatures never exceeding 85F. Often just a trickle of smoke flows over the meat, very gradually permeating the tissue to give a mellow and delicate flavor. Cold smoked products keep for months.

There are several ways to cure meat before smoking it, but the traditional methods are dry curing and brine curing.

Dry Curing. This is a salt dehydration process, now little used, that involves rubbing the meat with a mixture of salt, sugar, and often a small amount of sodium nitrate. Then the meat is stored at cool temperatures, allowing three days for each pound of meat. The salt gradually draws the moisture from the meat tissues. Large hams and bulky cuts often take longer than a month to cure. When the curing is finished, the meat is soaked a few days to draw off excess salt, air dried, then cold smoked. Food preserved this way is salty but almost indestructible.

Brine Curing. This involves soaking the meat in a pickling solution of salt, sugar, spices, and often a tiny amount of sodium nitrite at a rate of two to four days per pound. A six-pound pork shoulder takes about twenty-four days to brine cure; a big fifteen-pound ham must stay in the brine for two months. Often brine is injected along the bone of a big ham with a hypodermic needle. After the meat is cured, it may be soaked in fresh water a few days, dried, and then smoked.

Smoking cured meats improves their flavor immeasurably; the famous cured smoked hams of Virginia are testimony to this slow, careful process which makes hams, bacon, and sausages of premium quality.

Very often cured cold smoked meats, especially hams and bacon, are finished off at the end of the smoking period with a brief burst of hot smoking until the internal temperatures reach 140F. Cured meats also can be hot smoked from the beginning at graduated temperatures for briefer periods than cold smoking demands, though gourmets and connoisseurs agree the results are not as fine.

An oven thermometer is a must for smokehouse equipment.

The most efficient smoking is not done over a campfire, but in the confines of a closed shelter with a smoke source at one end and a vent at the other. Boxes, barrels, chimneys, old refrigerators, chicken houses, backyard barbecues, and tool sheds all have been converted into smokers or smokehouses successfully, though perhaps some of them shouldnt have been. A chicken house or a barrel that contained pungent substances, such as oil or detergent, imparts the flavor of the original use to the meat. It is vital to the final rich flavor to start out with a clean, neutral-scented smoker.

Old refrigerators, though often recommended as being easily converted into good smokers, have real drawbacks. The insulation often catches fire and ruins the meat being smoked; the plastic parts and chromed racks, when subjected to heat, give off toxic gases. The newer model refrigerators are almost completely plastic on the inside and dangerous to use as a smoker. Besides, a grimy, smoke-stained old refrigerator sitting in your backyard is something of an eyesore. It is better to build a permanent and attractive, sturdy smokehouse, or a box or barrel smoker that can be put away when the job is done.