Cooking with Your Chimney Smoker

If you have a chimney, then you can easily have barbeques right inside your home with the use of a chimney smoker. If you have a large fireplace, you can simply hang a whole chicken or a leg ham or a large fish right above your fireplace and let it cook slowly through good wood and fire. If you have a smaller fireplace, you can also use the smaller types of chimney smoker that you can buy from the market and smoke sausages, fish or meat cut in smaller pieces.

Of course, what makes this type of cooking special is when the fish or meat absorbs the distinct flavor of the wood you cook with. Hard woods such as cherry, apple, juniper and oak are the best types of wood to use for log fire. There are two ways of smoking food. The first one is hot smoking which is the more common of the two. This is where you prepare your fire until it is hot enough and cook your meat or fish from about half an hour to an hour. The other method of smoking is called cold smoking. This is where you let the fire from your chimney smoker cool down for about 25-30 degree Celsius, and let your meat or fish cook slowly through the smoke and smoldering fire.

Cold smoking gives the food a different flavor than what it would normally taste when smoked hot. However, this type of smoking requires attention. You'll need to keep the fire just at the right temperature and supply steady smoke. If you're cooking fish, it can take about five to six hours and if you're smoking meat, it can take as long as one week to get the best taste. When cold smoking, you need to prepare damp saw dusts which you can put on the coal on your chimney smoker to keep the flames in low temperature. Be sure that you put enough saw dusts from time to time and watch it closely in case the fire becomes too hot or too cold.

One reminder that everyone should remember, whether hot smoking or cold smoking is to make sure that the fire in your chimney smoker has been completely put off after use.