salt, sugar, pepper, smoke

The past week our smoker's been going full tilt.  A handful of briquettes, some chunks of wood and a (slightly modified) kettle grill can do anything...

First, I lit a few briquettes (Kingsford with the embedded mesquite) and stacked them on one side of the lower grate of the grill using a couple bricks to keep them stacked against the side.  Maybe 10-20 briquettes at any one time.  On the other side of that same grate was a tray of water, to moderate the temperature.  The stainless insert is no longer commercially available, but the extra capacity could also be achieved using the rotisserie collar.  This gives an approximation of the mighty Weber Smokey Mountain.

 This was posted earlier but should not be forgotten.  Some almonds lightly dressed with olive oil and coarse salt and allowed to smoke a couple hours.

This glorious 10 pounds of bacon was a barter job with some friends from Twitter, I think we made out better on the deal.  Thanks @SelimaCat and @M_Herriot!  They cured, I smoked and received oodles of their homemade goodies.  These pork bellies looked fantastic.  They took about 2 1/2 hours. We pulled them and wrapped them in foil when they hit about 140°F.

I grabbed a couple pieces of salmon, mediocre quality, just Kroger stuff and layered them with salt, brown sugar and peppercorns, (no weighing) and let the fish sit in it for two days.  The fish was rinsed thoroughly and smoked about 2 hours while I endured the mania of holiday Target.  It's pretty amazing.  You need to smoke salmon.

With these conditions, the smoking chamber was about 200-225F.  Smoke wood, apple, generously donated by @RachelTayse and @Alex_Baillieul an industrious and creative couple I've enjoyed getting to know.