My Smoker Adventures

[Mike]

Last February, I was in a sporting goods store when I spied an electric smoker on sale for half price. Since I had been thinking of trying one anyway, I bought it. Since then, I have been having a great time experimenting with different meats and woods.

The first meat was an eight pound Pork butt, or shoulder. I smoked it with a mix of apple for sweetness and Pecan for the main smoke. According to the on-board digital control, I was smoking at 220°. By the time the internal temperature was 196°, it had been cooking for 16 hours and it was wonderful!



Then, I did a brisket, again with excellent results, although it took 22 hours to reach my final temperature of 202°. Sorry, no pictures of the brisket.

After that, I sliced a Beef Eye of Round into jerky strips, marinaded overnight and smoked. This is some good jerky and much cheaper than buying it at retail.

Another Pork butt followed. This time a big boy of 11 pounds. After my last two experiences, I planned for more time in the smoker and and kicked it off at 7:00 pm the night before I planned to eat it. 26 hours later, it was done. Once again very tasty!



After experiences, I'm thinking the on-board digital thermometer is not too accurate, so I purchased a Inkbird Thermometer to make it easy to remotely check what is going on in the smoker. I'm really liking this! With only one quick trial, it appears the smoker is reading about 8° - 10° low. That should account for a lot of my long cook times.

Yesterday afternoon, on the spur of the moment, I decided to try some Salmon steaks. Having never done this I took a look at the 'net to get an idea how to proceed. I didn't have much in the way of ingredients to do a glaze, and I certainly didn't have time to marinate the fish, so away I went, anyway. I set the smoker to 220° to pre-heat while I prepared the Salmon. All I did was to pat it dry, sprinkle with salt, pepper, paprika and a little brown sugar. Into the smoker with Applewood for a little over 2 hours and eat! I served it over brown rice and topped it with sauteed peppers and onions. Damn good eating! Even my daughter, who claimed to hate Salmon, loved it.

Somewhere along the line, I found the need to use the smoker inside my garage due to inclement weather. Using my backwoods engineering skills and parts from my extensive pile of stuff that never gets thrown out because I might need something someday, I cobbled together a proof of concept smoke extractor. I used a 6", 12 volt computer fan which fit perfectly inside a six foot long 6" PVC fence post to send the smoke outside through a window. It works so well that I am going to find a dedicated space in the garage for the smoker and hook up a permanent vent system.




I didn't want any scent of smoke in the garage, and I also didn't want to suck the heat out of the smoker, so I placed the fan and vent pipe a few inches away from the vent on the smoker as you can see in the video.



Please note:
There was no duct tape used in this project as it was only a proof of concept. For the finished, permanent project, copious use of duct tape can be expected.