Homemade Cold Smoke Oven
For making cold smoked
salmon or trout, bacon, meat or salami, a special oven is needed. A professional
oven in stainless steel is quite expensive and a special build oven in stone and
bricks are expensive and big. -Too
big! I looked at the Internet and found at lot of offers and solutions, from
building plans and drawings to at giant oven in bricks
and even a cheap millboard concept. None of it suited me.
Im a craftsman, still got a lot of tools and are used to find
solutions myself.
So I decided to make an oven of my own design.
There were certain demands to make it
work. It
had to be placed in
the
shadow, because otherwise it won’t work
on
sunny warm days. I wanted it as small as possible, but still
functional. I wanted it cheap and easy to build.
I decided to start with a 200 litre oil drum, try it out and see if it was
possible to make it work.
Well... Things turned out
just right (and a bit lucky) and
resulted in a cheap, easy to build and absolutely
functional oven for cold smoke. I have gladly used it for years and a lot of
people have successfully copied my design. I want to share the design with you,
so you can build your own oven, if you are used to work with tools. So this is
free for everybody, except if someone will try to make money out of it. I want
the design to be free for everybody!
Enjoy... :-)
Cold Smoke
Cold smoke??? -Isn’t that hard to do? -Sure... If you don’t know how, it’s not easy. But with a little bit of knowledge, you will do just fine! Actually the process is quite simple and easy to do! -Believe me... You can easily make cold smoked salmon or trout, in high quality. I’ll show you how...
You will need this to build the oven
A 200 litre oil drum, two gridirons from an old oven or grill (barbeque), some pieces of iron, iron plate, two hinges, rivets, a piece of wood, paint, foam and glue. You’ll also need some tools. Drill, Angle grinder, riveter and some hand tools.
How to build the oven
Lid
Rip off the outer edge of the rolling, so the end of the drum will loosen, like the illustration below. For this, you will need a angle grinder. When it is loose, you almost have your lid.
Be careful. The edge is quite sharp! Fix it with the angle grinder, until the edge is nice and round.
Then fit a piece of flat iron as a grip and mount it with rivets or bolts.
Fit a piece of foam and glue it on the lower side of the lid. For this purpose, water based contact glue is fine. This is for avoiding condense water, dripping inside the oven.
You also can fit foam on top of the lid, as extra isolation.
Now your lid is done.
Hatch
Cut a hole in the drum, just like on the drawing on the top of this page. 35 cm wide and 25 cm high.
Unsharpen the edges and refit the hatch with the two hinges.
Cut two pieces of metal plate like the picture below and mount them with rivets. By turning the outer metal piece, you can lock the hatch.
Fireplace
The fireplace are made of a piece of ungalvanized iron plate, sized about 30 * 45 cm. Bend up the edges like the picture below.
Bottom
Drill some holes in the middle of the bottom of the drum, like shown below.
Place two pieces of wood on the bottom.
Gridirons
Cut four pieces of 10 mm round iron in suitable lengths. Bend them in one end only, about an inch in 90 degrees. This will work as a stop, so they won’t fall down. These wil function as foundation for the gridirons.
Drill the 8 holes, like on the drawing on the top of this page. Place the bars in the holes.
Rebuild two gridirons so they fit in the oven, like shown below. Two gridirons from a 57 cm Weber grill fits too.
All you need to do now, is to clean your oven inside, so there are no oil left. Then paint it. If you don’t paint it, you will soon get corrosion.
Place the oven on some bricks or pieces of wood, so air can flow beneath the oven.
Place the oven in the shadow and not in a windy place. Mine is placed in a shed. Be prepared, that it will smell of smoke, when it’s in duty.
Now your oven is ready!
Cold smoked salmon or trout
Cold smoked salmon or trout, are a process where the salted filets are smoked long time in low temperature, between 1 and 25 degrees Celsius. If the temperature gets higher, the fish fall apart and the result is a grumsy boring filet. So... DO NOT try to cold smoke in warm weather where the air temperature is higher than 25 degrees Celsius.
Salting
First the filets need salting. The easiest way to do that, is dry salting. Salting draws a lot of fluid out of the meat, so the filet will appear more compact after salting. How hard you want to salt the filets, are a matter of taste. I’ll recommend to dry salt your first filets about 2 - 3 hours. After that, you can adjust it too your taste.
If you don’t know how to filet your fish, you can find some help here: Filetér fisken. I know it’s on Danish, but perhaps you can figure it out by looking at the pictures.
Place the filets on a draining tray. Remember there will be drawn out a lot of fluid. Salt them like the picture below and cover them with Vita Wrap or something like that.
Place the draining tray so the fluid can run into a sink.
When the salting time is over, about 3 hours, remove the rest of the salt under running water.. .
Then dry the filets with kitchen roll. You can place them on a news paper on the skin side, during this.
Place the filets in the oven....
Sawdust and smoke
Sawdust is not just
sawdust. The most common material for cold smoke is beech. Anyway, other types
of hardwood can be used, but I’ll recommend beech!
It
has to be dried out. So you have to use special treated sawdust, exactly made for cold smoke.
Try to contact the nearest smoke house and buy your
smoking sawdust there.
NEVER use sawdust containing pine!
Also make sure NOT to use sawdust that is fungal infected.
Light the oven
Place the sawdust in the
fireplace in shape of an U. Lever it as
much as possible.
A 5 - 7 cm thick layer is needed. -Otherwise it won’t burn.
Pour a little bit of methylated spirit in one end of the trail of sawdust and light it. After about 10 minutes, the fire will die out and only a glow will remain. The glow will slowly burn its way through the sawdust.
When there is only a glow left, place the fireplace in the oven on the two pieces of wood.
Control the process now and then and refill the fireplace with fresh sawdust, when needed. Actually the same glow can go on, round and round, forever, if you just keep on refilling the fireplace.
Cold smoking filets of salmon or trout, takes about 24 hours. Perhaps you like it more or less smoked, but I think you should smoke the fillets 24 hours the first time. It tastes like heaven.
Add more salt
If you like, it’s possible to add more salt. Try to taste the filets after 15 - 20 hours in the smoke oven. If they need a little more salt, you can easily add a little bit more. But be careful. You can only add salt... Not remove it!
By the way... Parasites can live inside the filets. To avoid any disease, freeze the filets in more than 10 days. You can do this before or after the cold smoking.
Sliced Filets
First you have
to remove the pin bones. For this purpose, a pean is perfect.
With the pean, you can simply pull the pinbones out.
To cut the slices, a filet knife is perfect. By sloping the cuts, the slices are getting wider and better looking.
Like below, you even can place a double layer of slices on the tray.
Juniper berry, spices, sugar and chili.
Try to add some juniper berries in the sawdust, when smoking. Also try to add some spices in the sawdust.
If you like it "Indian style", try to add a little bit of sugar and chili to the filets, after the salting.
I hope that this will convince you that cold smoking are quite easy and cheap to do. Also that it’s a funny way to experiment and improve your cooking.
Have fun...
Mik Andersen