Smoker for meat: simple designs

Smokehouse, if it is well designed and correctly applied, allows you to give different products a unique flavor, unique taste. And - significantly increase the shelf life of food products. Therefore, it is necessary to approach the choice of a suitable variant as carefully as possible and take into account all the nuances, sometimes the smallest.

There are two main modes of smoking: cold and hot. The processing mode in these modes differs significantly, and for each of them special devices must be applied. In cold processing, smoke is used, with an average temperature of 25 degrees. The processing time is considerable: it is at least 6 hours, and sometimes reaches several days.

The advantages of this solution are as follows:

• maximum storage of food;
• the processed piece of meat is able to preserve its taste properties for many months;
• the ability to smoke sausage.

But it should be noted that to store in the refrigerator products obtained by cold smoking, will not work. To build a suitable smokehouse, you will have to use an area of ​​250 by 300 cm.

Hot smoking requires heating the smoke to 100 degrees. This is a very fast operation (from 20 to 240 minutes), and therefore this method is suitable for home and field processing of products. The taste is slightly worse, and food should be used a maximum of 48 hours after processing.

It is quite simple to make a smoking furnace with your own hands: you will need to make a tight closed container with a hermetically closed lid, add lattice and hooks to hold the products. Be sure to provide a pan, where they could drain the excess water and fat. If you follow this schematic diagram, designing and creating a smokehouse will not be difficult: the chips or sawdust are poured into a bucket, a pallet is put, and a grate is placed 0.1 m from the edge.

For the apparatus of cold smoking products you must first prepare the ground. On the place where the heating chamber will be installed, bricks or wooden blocks (logs) are put, which need to be buried 0.2 m deep. Having strengthened the site, they put the camera itself, which is easy to build from buckets or barrels. The pit for the fire should have a width of 200-250 cm, depth - approximately 0.5 m. From the fire to the smoke chamber, you need to build a chimney (dig a special tunnel). Slate laying helps reduce heat loss.

It should be noted that the preparation of smoked meat should be regulated by varying the force of burning. An iron sheet or a piece of slate, the location of which can be changed, is put directly above the fire. To increase the smoke delay in the smokehouse helps to cover it with wet coarse cloth; Special rods at the top of the chamber help to avoid the fall of such a shell.To fill the smoking machine with food, you need to make a special door in the side of the structure.

The drawings of the hot smokehouse are somewhat different - to make such a system more difficult. The heating chamber is placed inside a cone-shaped smoke enclosure. The seams of the apparatus must be strictly sealed, the need for a pallet is eliminated. As a result, the meat becomes bitter in taste and filled with harmful ingredients. During the burning of dripping fat, the combustion products saturate those products that are decided to be smoked, therefore, the outflow of fats is thought out.

Since the chips should smolder and not burn in any case, it is necessary to heat the bottom of the smoke chamber. Smoke generators help to avoid softening of meat, bacon or fish with condensate. The best models of smoke generators have a hydraulic valve and a discharge tube.

Most amateur craftsmen prefer smokehouses for half-hot smoking.Often they even make them from unnecessary cases of refrigerators, from which they remove: a compressor device, tubes for pumping freons, a freezer, plastic parts, thermal protection. Air exchange is provided by the remaining tubes.

However, it will take too much time to heat the smokehouse from the old refrigerator - it is much more practical and more economical to use old washing machines for this purpose (especially for small and medium portions of smoked meat). They remove the motors with activators and relays, and the hole where the shaft is located is made wider to facilitate smoke removal. Fat is discharged through the former plums.

If you need to raise the smokehouse above the surface, you can create a kind of podium of cement parts, the intervals between which are filled with a mixture of clay and sand. When using the simplest construction on the basis of the barrel, it is recommended to lay out its perimeter with a brick border of a small height. The upper part of the tank and the holes drilled in it serve to fasten metal rods and hooks onto which pieces of food can be hung. Ceramic tile is often used for facing the ends.

Important: it is worthwhile to envisage fixing large portions of meat or fish, since small sooty pieces quickly dry out and become hard and tasteless.

How to make a smokehouse with your own hands, see the next video.