Homemade Smoker

Several readers have asked about my progress, living out off the grid in my 26 ft travel trailer, and I must say my only regret is that I should have gotten off my ass and moved out here sooner. Peace of mind, with time to think, if I was not working, 12 hours a day that is. You would think that with gasoline being $4.00 a gallon, work for a handyman would have slowed down, but I am working more hours at this, than I did at a “regular” job. I am beginning to think all this work is defeating the purpose of being self-employed; at least it seems that way at the moment.

Anyway that extra money will be useful, when I start building that goat barn / chicken house; I have been seeing when I doze off to sleep at night. I am certain work will slow down during the winter months. Speaking of winter months, I need to start cutting, splitting and stacking firewood, so I can feed my little wood stove when the whether turns off on the frosty side.

My latest project has been building a low cost smokehouse. Regular readers of the Survivalist Blog will remember, how I built a small root cellar using an old refrigerator, my dirt cheap smokehouse is being built on the same principal, with an old fridge being the main component.

When smoking meat you need a cool smoke, since you are smoking, not cooking the meat. You also want a constant but not a tremendous amount of smoke to move over and passed the meat. The fuel you select will flavor the meat. Corn cobs are used by some, hard woods that are not completely dried, are what I have used in the past. Soft woods, such as pine and spruce, impart a bad taste to the meat, stay away from these. While pork is most often the meat of choice, do not be limited to thinking this is the only type of meat that can be used. Beef, poultry and fish are delicious after being smoked with hardwood.

The smokehouse I am working on has a smoke chamber made from the old refrigerator. Two holes six inches each, are cut into it, one at the bottom for smoke to enter from the fire pit, which is dug in ten feet away, and one at the top acting as flue to pull the smoke though passed the hanging meat out the top of the unit.