Cold smoking with a foam cooler

Unknown

I post here rarely, but for quite awhile I've been wanting to try smoking cheeses. Since I'm in Florida, outside air temp was a major concern. I did some digging and came across the cool soldering-iron / tin-can trick. I cleaned out my Egg and put the contraption in the bottom, and while it worked well enough, dome temps rose as high as 100 degrees, which is more than I wanted to see -- and that was with a bed of ice under the food grid.

So after some thinking, I devised this redneck-looking contraption. This is an Omaha Steaks cooler that I had left over from some meats somebody gave me. I mention that because it's quite a bit thicker than a regular foam cooler. The rest is self-explanatory, except that now I can put the soldering-iron smoke contraption up on the food grid, in the dome, and I don't have to clean out any ash or lump before I cold-smoke.

I put the BGE tray into the bottom of the cooler which gives me about a 2" bed of ice, then I rest a metal grate directly on the ice and put the food on top. You can see I haven't bothered to extend the vent hose to any significant length. Dome temps rose to about 135 degrees over a period of one hour, whereas a temp probe inside the cooler read a steady 69 degrees. Outside air was about 82 (late afternoon). I could probably pre-chill the cooler and run it colder if I wanted, and the temp probe was up near the top, near the exit vent, I'm sure it was much colder down at the food level. Also I could cool it more just by stretching the hose a lot more. It's a 25-footer so that would be easy.



A question I have is at what point will the smoking chamber be so cold that it causes condensation and I start losing all those tasty phenols I keep reading about? I'm also thinking it would be preferable to have the cold ice up high, since cold air falls, but I'd have to think about how to prevent condensation from dripping on the food below ... and my weather-guesser friend says cold-above-hot only results in unpredictable turbulence anyway. I'm probably overthinking it, considering cold smoking time will rarely run more than two hours.

My next trick is to figure out how to run my Egg around 150-155 consistently so I can make some jerky. I suck at controlling temps below about 220 in the Florida sun...

civil eggineer

You might be a redneck...

Quite the contraption!