What genuine pleasure smoked products give us. Lard, sausages and golden fish cooked in this way simply melt in your mouth. The cost of ready-made delicacies is quite high, but you can not give up your favorite treats, but just do the manufacturing of a smokehouse with your own hands.
If you have your own summer cottage, this is a great opportunity to think about a solid building and combine it with a grill and barbecue grill for barbecue. But if you don’t particularly want to mess with the construction, but you still want smoked meats, then any metal container with a lid, but without a bottom, is perfect for making a smokehouse with your own hands. The assembly process will not require special skills from you.
Consider the option of making a smokehouse with your own hands from a metal barrel. To begin with, we select a permanent place on the site and select a piece of land equal to the diameter of our barrel. We remove sod on this site and dig a hole about 40-50 centimeters deep. We spread the bottom and walls with bricks or a flat stone.
We remove the bottom from the barrel on both sides to make a metal pipe. An ideal option would be to make a small door in the side wall. Through it we will lay chips and regulate the combustion process. But if it is problematic to make the door for you, then in preparing the pit we slightly increase its size on one side.
The next step in making a smokehouse with your own hands is the internal grill. You can use two or four metal rods that are installed inside the barrel, in the form of spacers forming two parallel lines or a lattice. To them we will hang our fish or meat with the help of hooks.
We close the barrel with a metal sheet with pre-made holes. We put prepared pieces of bacon on hooks and hang on rods. We close the barrel with a sheet. We make a small fire in the pit, and when it burns out, pour out the dried wood chips from birch, alder, juniper or oak. Starting to smolder under the influence of coal, wood chips will begin to emit a large amount of hot smoke, which will rise up and out through the holes in the lid.
With the help of smoke, the temperature in the barrel will be kept at 120 degrees, and our lard will not only cook quickly, but also smoke well. Do-it-yourself smoked smokehouse is collected in this way. Products prepared in this way have a short shelf life, and they do not even have time to lie in the refrigerator.
You can smoke food with cold smoke, but it will take about 4-5 days. Ready-made delicacies will have a slightly dried appearance, but the shelf life will be doubled. In order to cook lard or cold-smoked fish, it will be necessary to add a long trench (about 10 meters) to the previously proposed design, which will act as a chimney. In this design, the furnace is not located under the barrel, but at the very beginning of the chimney. Hot smoke has time to cool down to 40 degrees, until it goes all the way to the suspended products.
If these designs seem complicated to you, then the best option is a mini-smokehouse with your own hands, made of an ordinary bucket with a lid and several bricks. We take an old unnecessary bucket and remove its bottom. In the lid we make several holes for the exit of smoke. On the ground we put a low well in two bricks, in which we will kindle a fire. You can do without bricks and light a fire right on the ground, subsequently setting our bucket on the coals. We insert into it a round grill from the grill or, after making several holes in the side walls, we stick a few rods. Our miniature smokehouse is ready.
Using any of the proposed methods of making a smokehouse with your own hands, you can please relatives and friends with delicious delicacies. It is worth remembering that before laying products in the smokehouse, they should be pre-salted or pickled.