Whan that Octobere, with his snew shoures calte,
The harte of manne hath shivered to the roote,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimage,
And bringen home som bacon for to priketh hir courage.
– with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer!

In his Guide to Better Bacon, Ari Weinzweig says that Nueske’s is the bacon that they sell and use the most at Zingerman’s Deli and Roadhouse, and he quotes R. W. Apple’s claim, in the New York Times, that Nueske’s is “the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers.” In other words, well worth a pilgrimage when you find yourself visiting friends who live a mere 40 miles away. After eating it at every meal for a couple days, I can pronounce that it is indeed superb bacon. Nearly as good as the bacon that I make and offer to TLP members.

But don’t take my word for it; judge for yourself. I bought a whole, 10-pound slab, and, as a special offer this month, Nueske’s bacon will be available to any member placing an order. If you think Nueske’s bacon tastes better, I’ll refund the money you wasted on my bacon. That’s putting my money where my big mouth is!

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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.

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