Our Lovely Smokehouse

Praise and love to dear Uncle Robert!

When my brother heard that the hogs had been butchered, he offered to come up and help us construct a smokehouse. Well, had I any idea what he actually had in mind, I probably would have said "no thanks!" Haha! I'm very glad that the runaway train left the station before I could say anything, because what we have now is so beautiful and wonderful that I don't even care about the intense undertaking it ended up being.

I'm not going to explain, step by step, what we did...I will only tell you the basic elements involved and then leave you with a whole bunch of pictures of the process. There are as many ways to build a smokehouse as there are fish in the sea...so long as a few basics are kept in mind, and so long as the smoker is patient with him/herself, it will work gloriously and all involved will eat like kings!

The smokehouse we constructed is intended for cold smoking meats, cheeses, nuts and a whole variety of food stuffs. Cold smoking is a much more involved (but time worthy!) method of smoking food which enables the smoker a wider selection of smoke styles. The smoke flavors the meat and begins to preserve it without cooking it in a normal "heat meets meat" way. Due to the absence of a lot of heat, you can smoke things for much longer, arrive at much more complex flavors and smoke many more types of foods than with a typical high heat smoking method. 

The important factors to consider when constructing a smokehouse for cold smoking:

-Creating a critter and bug proof structure.

-Creating a firebox which removes the heat of the fire from the smoking area.

-Creating a place for the smoke to go...so, a venting system of some sort, so that the smoke can pass over the meat.

-Creating a smoking area where meat can be hung/racked without touching(other pieces of meat).

We got the draft on our smokehouse just right and the chimney just sucks the smoke right up into the house. If anyone has any questions about what we did, materials used, etc...just ask in the comments and I will answer!

With all of that in mind...enjoy the pictures of our smokehouse construction!

Happy Smokehouse. Thank you, Uncle Robert! We love you so much...now, time to get smoking! This thing is going to be jamming!