Cold Smoke Generator

Cold smoking requires little more than a cardboard box and a way to generate cold smoke. The idea is to be able to expose your cured bacon, salmon or other delicacy to smoke without any heat being added.

I have made a couple of different cold smoke generators and having pulled different ideas together would recommend following the sketch below. this allows the most flexibility between free standing or clipping onto the side of you smoker box (you would need a wooden or steel cabinet for this).

As far as materials of construction; Stainless steel is first prize but is expensive. Mild steel is perfectly alright. You can also use copper in the construction. Stay clear of galvanised (Zinc coated) materials for any of it as this can be poisonous.

You need a source of pressurised air connected onto the thin inner tube. The air blowing out the end of the inner pipe causes a venturi suction and pulls air up through your smoldering wood chips and blows the cool smoke out the front.

Having tried both a large compressor at one extreme and a basic fish pond air pump on the other. The fish pond pump is SIGNIFICANTLY better. I was hesitant at first and thought it wouldn't supply enough air flow however in practice still had to slow the pump down as it produced too much air flow.

Another option is a simple T piece on top of the unit out of copper pipe as per the photo below. I used this successfully on some of my units built. You can see the inner pipe on this too. made of thinner copper tube. Don't get too caught up in exact measurements. I have found that anything close to the scale above that looks right is bound to work.

Another basic tin option:

Connection to a compressor is not even effective when throttling the air with a ball valve. You can use a compressor as per the photo below to generate a huge amount of smoke. This is however completely unnecessary and also has the disadvantage that you burn lots of wood chips and generate a huge amount of tannin / creosote which are bitter from the high temperature of the wood burning.

My current setup - based on the operational principle of the diagram at the beginning of this post is as follows with a basic cardboard box smoking cabinet:

Below is a video with the smoke generator running as I use it (fairly well turned down):

You don't need anything fancy as the smoking cabinet although I would like to build something that I can store outdoors to minimise setup and pack up time. here is an earlier smaller box:

Bacon on the go

Here is some added info on the wood chips I use. I use a lot of beech wood chips. they have a nice well balanced smoke flavour. these are what I use:

Here is a link to the GOLDSPAN site where they have some interesting information on humidity etc. in your smoking chamber. I need to play with humidity a bit I think

beech smoking chips

close up showing chip size - perfect