True cold smoking is not an easy task to accomplish at home nor can you just go out and buy a true cold smoker intended for home use. Those of us who enjoy curing meats and making sausage all dream about the ability to smoke a salmon filet to make lox or make real homemade bacon that is cured, smoked and uncooked.

To call something cold smoked means it must be smoked at temperatures not exceeding 100F. These low temperatures mean the meat is not cooked while being smoked so any cold smoked meats you create should be thoroughly cooked before consuming. The chemical process that occurs during cold smoking preserves the meat while imparting the smoke flavor. For certain items like cheese and lox, cold smoking is the only method available, cheese would melt and salmon would not keep it's raw texture if cooked at high temperatures while smoking. All meats that are cold smoked are also cured in some manner before the long cold smoking process begins. Generally curing salt is used to cure the meat before cold smoking. Curing salts contain nitrites and or nitrates that create an inhospitable environment inside the meat which keeps bacteria from growing. The warm slow smoking process would otherwise give bacteria an ideal situation to prosper. The curing step is often also used to add additional flavor to the meat before smoking, pastrami and maple cured bacon are two examples of this added flavor.

A Homemade Cold Smoker
Engineering your own cold smoker is about the only way we home curers can achieve cold smoking. This task may seem daunting, but is well worth the results. The ability to control the process on your own from curing to smoking makes you a true artisan capable of creating meats with flavors and quality unavailable to anyone else. If you wish to read the long story of how i made my cold smoker you can read my blog here

Below are some pictures of my final cold smoker. To generate the smoke i use a single electric burner on which i place a cast iron skillet. The chips are then placed inside the skillet where they smolder creating the smoke. To funnel the smoke into the meat box i punched a hole in a cake pan creating tabs that were bent up for the dryer duct to attach on. The cake pan nests nicely inside the upper lip of the skillet and the smoke then flows up and into the duct. The open end of the duct is then inserted into the chip loading hole in the side of my masterbuilt smoker. I do quite a bit of hot smoking which is why i have the masterbuilt electric smoker, but this setup cold just as easily funnel into a cardboard box or any other meat chamber.