Just bought myself a Bradley Hot & Cold Smoker on eBay (2nd hand but not used) - does anyone use one on here? I need some pointers to get me started...
Most important thing to understand is that it is what the americans call a "smoker" and as such intended for the type of 'hot smoking' that they call "BBQ" - this is fairly 'low and slow' cooking.
The Bradley needs modification/extension to do what we in the UK call "cold smoking". That is how (cold) "smoked salmon" and smoked cheese is made -- relying on the smoke being below 30C, ideally well below.
Smoking (for example) salmon (cold) involves hours of smoking, which is expensive with Bradley pucks.
You can find aluminium disk blanks that can be inserted in the stack so that perhaps only one in three gives smoke - thus you can run it for three times as long on the same number of pucks.
It is possible - but far from simple - to cut wood discs, to use as pucks.
For proper cold smoking, you need to insert some dwell time for cooling between the smoke generator (in unhooks easily) and the chamber. A decent length of aluminium ducting should do nicely.
But the Bradley will do "hot-smoked" salmon very controllably.
To learn about UK-style smoking, get Erlandson's (cheap, excellent, little paperback) book "Home Smoking and Curing".
The internet will tell you more than you want to know about US "BBQ" ... opinions on 'Q' are more diverse and entrenched than even beeks are used to!
For home (UK-style) cold smoking, the Pro-Q cold smoke generator is bl**dy brilliant. With
fine and
dry sawdust (important that - sieve and oven can be helpful with homemade sawdust) it will smoulder away for 8 hours unattended - which is much harder to achieve than you might expect! You could even use one of them as the generator, while employing the Bradley as its chamber ... just pop it in the bottom of the Bradley 'oven'.
// ADDED Pro-Q, made in Cornwall... !
http://www.macsbbq.co.uk/CSG.html
