Filing Cabinet Cold Smoker - Introduction

Salting and Smoking food was prior to refridgeration one of the major ways by which food was preserved. Whilst this need has gone, the techniques linger on, turning pork into bacon, salmon into smoked salmon, providing us with food that is ever lastingly popular or near the top of most gourmets list of favourite bites.

The trouble is that unless you have both the means and ability to buy from specialised outlets, the cured and smoked produce you buy today is of very dubious quality. Buy bacon from a supermarket and watch it shrink in a frying pan, emitting white gunk. The chance are your smoked salmon is of the farmed variety, flabby meat pumped with dyes and God knows what else?

You may think that there is no way to avoid this, that the processes involved in creating these foods are beyond the scope of the home consumer.

In fact though both curing and smoking are very very simple.

This project does not cover curing, but looks at creating a cold smoker out of a filing cabinet, which could also be used as a hot smoker, but as of this time I have not tried hot smoking.

Hot and Cold smoking deserve a little explanation at this point. Hot smoking will produce cooked produce ready to eat, cold smoking flavours and preserves produce, which then may well be eaten raw like smoked Salmon or may require cooking.

This article is instructions on the finished machine, but since I started almost from scratch it was a learning process, and you may find it useful reading to follow the development of the project on the River Cottage Forums. If you are interested in this project, then no doubt you will find plenty of other  things to interest you on the forums, so take a look anyway!