Cooking For Engineers

[KJETTEN]

I recently attended a Vegetable & Garlic Cooking class that featured a wonderful Smoked Tomato and Garlic Soup recipe. However, I am unsure of the cold smoking technique and have search all over the web for information.

Would anyone have experience with the cold smoking technique?
Where can I find a cold smoker? or can I rig one up?

Thanks,
Karla

[rexmo]

Maybe googling pastrami or smoked fish would get you some info, they're typically done using cold smoking. Think low and slow smoking taken to an extreme.

If I were trying to do this, I'd use two smokers, one to generate the smoke, and the other unlit as a chamber to do the smoking, to eliminate most of the heat of the fire generating the smoke. So some sort of ducting would be required, maybe a blower.

If it's going into a hot soup, you could argue that cold smoking is not really necessary. Try putting your tomatoes and garlic on a smoker and make the soup with them once smoked. It is often argued that smoke absorption is appreciable only while the food is below cooking temperatures, i.e., in the early stages of cooking.

I would recommend getting your fire well established and past the bitter, creosotey initial stage characterized by grey-white smoke. The nearly invisible blue smoke is what you're after.

One further point, the choice of wood used to smoke may make more difference than the cold smoking. You might want to try to find out what it was smoked over.

[DrBiggles]