building and using a smoker for meat

[shepherd]

I am building a smoker cabinent using an old fridge and barbque tray. A leg of lamb is the intended use and I was wondering how to get the best results since this is a first time experiment. Anybody with experience that has tips to share?
This animal was a 4-h project and I'am also going to tan the skin to keep as a fond memory of the year so if anybody can offer any tips on tanning that'd be great also. Did one a few years ago using alum but have forgotten the exact recipe for how much to use.

 

[woodlot]

Re: the smoker. A tip for you: Do not put your wood chips in an aluminum pan and set it on the burner. Use a nice heavy non-meltable pan. Please do not ask me how I came to learn this information.......humm......don't ask the fire department either. All I can say is that molten aluminum will melt a LP gas line quite easily..... /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

 

[hazmat]

The fridge has insulation in it - becareful to keep the hot away from the "cabinet"

 

[Bird]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Do not put your wood chips in an aluminum pan )</font>

/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gifWhen I used a charcoal smoker, I just put the wood chips directly on the charcoal, but now that I'm using a gas (LPG) grill, I bought a heavy cast iron container that Home Depot has for the Charbroil grills. It works pretty well, although I wish it was just a little larger.

 

[HGM]

When I lived in Miami, I worked with mostly Cubans. They taught me allot about barbq. This link shows the type of box they used. Box Its in Spanish, but you'll get the idea. It translates into Chineese Box. It actually cooks the meat w/o any smoke or open flame. It slowly roasts the meat inside the box with charcoal placed in a tray on top of the box. I know this sounds backwards(heat rises) but it works beautifully. The best tasting pig I have ever had came out of these boxes. A little different than the smoker idea, but the fridge sounded like a natural for this.

BTW, dont use galvanized either. This includes fencing. The galvanized coating is poisonous.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

The first one of those I made was for an old boy who smoked his trout. This was about thirty years ago.

We started with on old fridge with the works in the bottom and that little freezer compartment at the top of the cabinet. I put in a flue to regulate the heat on top and drilled holes in the floor of the cabinet.

Where the works used to be we put in a hot plate. He'd put in marinated chips and let that hot plate do it's thing. We put in extra racks and he could smoke trout until long after the cows came home.

The biggest problem I've seen with smokers is most folks want to cook instead of smoke the meat. You don't need a ton of fire nor do you need much heat, just time and smoke.

 

[shepherd]

Thanks, the ultimate plan here isn't to cook the meat but to try and capture the flavour and then cook it later. Right now the roast is in a pickling solution to cure it and then we'll try out the smoker next weekend.