Smoking meat in our home smoker that is!
Last week we drove past our local steak house and it smelled so good! They were smoking steaks and chops for dinner that night. We are really trying not to go out to eat so much so we discussed how we could achieve similar results cooking at home. Why, a smoker of course. But you know most smokers are over $100 if you go out to buy one. You CAN make one at home and I've been looking around at some of the plans.
Then, over the weekend, my daughter found a used smoker for us at a garage sale. $5 CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!! It had been used but everything was there and in relatively good condition and in a matter of hours, we were smoking meat for our dinner!
The smoker is a top loading Little Chief and it does a bang up job! All the important parts were there and we already had some packages of smoking wood so after a little clean up, we tried our first batch. Hubby wanted a rib-eye steak so we bought one to share and smoked it for about 1/2 hour or one pan of mesquite smoke chips. Then we put the steak on our little grill along with a couple ears of corn for another 15 to 20 minutes. It was really one of the best steaks we ever had!
Today we threw in a batch of homemade jerky that had been brining overnight and smoked it with Apple chips. Wow! Delish!
Now, we are going to try some fish and I thought maybe you'd like to read AND see the process. We had 3 really nice salmon steaks in our freezer that we bought at Costco. I put them into brine overnight in a brine that consisted of 1 qt. of water, 1/4 cup of pickling and preserving salt (you could also use non-iodized salt) and 1/4 cup of sugar. They will stay in the brine for 8 to 12 hours. Then they are rinsed and patted dry and put on trays sprayed with a little non-stick. We are going to use Alder chips for the smoking. I am so excited to see how they will turn out!
Here is a video with the process: