I’ve written before about what a great, little smoker the Bradley can be, but, as I have just learned, at my expense, there is a potential problem that Bradley owners need to be aware of, one that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

My smoker arrived with a crack in the black plastic at the base of the unit, just above the sliding switch for temperature control. As you can see in the photo (hopefully), the cracks radiate out from the top of the plastic piece, originating where the middle screw attaches it. Presumably, this screw was overtightened when the unit was assembled, causing the plastic to crack.

This is not just a cosmetic defect! According to the person I spoke with at Bradley recently, this allows moisture to get in and causes the temperature control unit to short out. But this takes time, and over this period of time you gradually lose temperature control. The first thing I noticed was that the highest temperature my Bradley could reach dropped 100 degrees (from 350º F to 250º F). Recently, I tried to use it as a fermentation chamber (as I have detailed elsewhere), only to discover that the temperature control had deteriorated to the point where the quartz heater was either completely off or completely on. As a result, an entire batch of salami got cooked instead of gently fermenting at 70º.

Once you’ve put so many hours into planning and preparing a batch of sausage like this, only to have it ruined by your equipment, it’s off-pissing to say the least.

All in all, I’m disappointed in Bradley. (more…)

Sorry for the silence! The job that puts meat on my table is building custom cabinets and furniture, and I’ve been putting in some long days recently to finish a project. It’s a ten-foot by six-foot display cabinet, featuring samples of all the elements in the periodic table, which should now be safely on its way to the chemistry department at the University of Iowa. Whew! If anyone’s interested, I’ll post some pictures of the installed cabinet when I get them.

Anyway, my woodworking and meat making have a number of intersections, and I’m always looking for ways to make use of my shop for This Little Piggy’s projects. I’ve written before about using up some scrap plywood to make a cold-smoking box that sits on top of the Bradley smoker.

Besides its weakness as a cold-smoker, another thing that bugged me about the Bradley was having to buy their bisquettes. Here I am, generating a hecatomb worth of scrap wood each month, and I couldn’t use it in this smoker. Until now. One of the many blogs I keep tabs on is Chilefire.com, and he has come up with this neat, simple method for using wood chips in the Bradley. He fills a small can with the wood chips, and this sits on the heating element in the smoker. He then covers this with a second, larger can, which has some holes drilled in the bottom (now on top) to let the smoke out. (By controlling the amount of oxygen that gets to the wood chips, I’m guessing the second, covering can also prevents the wood chips from igniting, which would damage the Bradley.)

He admits that this does take more monitoring, as a can only lasts about an hour, but I’m usually moving stuff around or basting about that often anyway. Leftover from this project, I’ve got about 50 gallons of oak shavings in my dust collector, so I’ll have the put this method to the test soon!

(Whoops, I spoke too soon! I’m not quite done with that cabinet. Just got a call that it needs a few, last minute alterations to accomodate some new features before it leaves for Iowa. I’ll be back tomorrow with my plans for this month’s meat making!)

Reading porsha’s recent post about picking up a Bradley smoker and checking in with the discussion on the sausagemaking forum about Bradleys got me thinking again about the Bradley’s Achilles heel–cold-smoking–and how I could modify it so that it would do a better job. (My local farmstead cheese maker will be making her first batch of ricotta this week, and smoked ricotta is something I’ve been wanting to make for a long time.)

The idea of cold-smoking is to add smoke flavor without changing the character of the food by cooking it, which means that you don’t want to get above body temperature or about 100 F. Think raw, smoked salmon (such as lox); smoked cheese and butter; in the winter, smoked ice cream. (As near as I can tell, I might be the first person crazy enough to try to smoke ice cream itself, rather than just adding some smoke flavoring. Why would you want to smoke ice cream? Just think of a “beer float,” with some smoked ice cream floating atop a glass of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout.)

The Bradley is a great, little smoker, but because the element that heats up the bisquettes to smoking temperatures sits right inside the smoking chamber, the temperature quickly gets above 100 F–except on the coldest days of the winter. The suggestion Ruhlman and Polcyn give for cold-smoking in the Bradley is to keep a tray of ice in the smoker, but this is messy and only works for a short while. The time-honored solution is to move the heat source away from the smoking chamber. To achieve this, Bradley now offers a cold-smoking accessory, which consists of a small metal box that surrounds the heating element and a length of flexible metal duct to connect it indirectly with the smoking chamber.

Although the setup is pretty clever, allowing you to switch back and forth between hot-smoking and cold-smoking with a minimum of fiddling around, there are a few things I didn’t like about it. First, it costs $100. Second, for it to work, you have to elevate your smoker on some kind of stand, since smoke rises. Finally, this setup adds a feature (cold-smoking), but it doesn’t add any capacity–you either have a cold-smoker or a hot-smoker, and the size of your smoking chamber remains the same.

What’s needed, I thought, is not to convert the Bradley to a cold-smoker, but to add one on to it. This would give you more smoking options and more capacity–more bang for your buck and schmeck for your smoke.

(more…)

After making the post last week, about A Budget Box for Dry Curing Meat, I realized that I had only covered part of the story. The old fridge is where various cured meats go to finish drying, but sausages that go through an initial fermentation stage require very different conditions, namely some heat and high humidity.

Just as in the fermentation of wine, the idea of fermentation in sausages is to promote the rapid growth of microflora that have been introduced for specific purposes (yeasts to covert sugar to alcohol in wine, bacteria to convert sugar to lactic acid in sausages). Not surprisingly, bacteria flourish around body temperature. And they need lots of water to grow best, so the trick at this stage is to keep the humidity very high (preferably in the 90s), so that the sausages don’t dry out too much and shut down the necessary activity of the lactic-acid-producing bacteria. These are the opposite of conditions that you want for drying, and since drying takes weeks or even months, while fermentation just takes a day or two, it’s a lot more convenient to have a separate box for fermentation.

Fortunately, I already had a small, refrigerator-like box with a built-in heat source, namely my Bradley smoker. In addition to the hot plate that heats up Bradley’s wood bisquettes to produce smoke, these great little smokers also have a 500-watt heating element, so that you can achieve cooking temperatures as well. This heating element is regulated by its own sliding control, so, with a little bit of trial and error, it’s possible to get it to maintain a steady, lower temperature. Since I wanted to measure humidity as well, I simply moved my greenhouse sensor from the curing fridge to the smoker and used its temperature readings to adjust the sliding control. The Bradley does have its own built-in thermometer, which is accurate enough, so you could just use that to set the heating element.

(more…)