Take up food smoking?

Why smoke your own food? Why not? Just think of homemade bacon butties, and fish smoked exactly the way you like it. But beware, home-smoking  can be as addictive as the other kind of smoking. The satisfaction lasts far longer though...

Yesterday, for example, I made a big pot of winter minestrone soup - a riot of borlotti beans and chopped vegetables flavoured with rendered cubes of home-smoked bacon. The bacon was one of the pieces started the day this photograph was taken last November for my food smoking article in the April issue of Country Living magazine (on sale March 12). So far THE bacon has kept for three months wrapped loosely in paper in the fridge without a sign of spoiling. It tastes, if anything, better than it did the day it came out of the smoker. Another piece from the same batch has been hanging in a calico bag in my garden shed for the same length of time, and that's still good too.

My organic home-smoked streaky bacon starts as thick pieces of thin end of belly of pork, carefully boned by the butcher. Don't let the butcher score the skin. Before smoking, the meat has to be cured with salt to draw out some of the moisture, making it less attractive to organisms that cause decay. This can be done the modern way: in refrigerated vacuum bags with small quantities of curing salt mixtures. Or it can done the old-fashioned way (my chosen method): with sea salt mixed with golden granulated sugar in a ratio of 2.5 to 1 rubbed in generously and cured for about five days in a covered box in the ambient cool temperature of a shed. It is then washed, dried for two days, again in the shed, before being smoked for 36 hours.

I had dreamt of building a wooden smokehouse in my garden - something like a sentry box with smouldering wood-chips in the bottom, and enough height to cool the smoke before it reached the food hanging above. There are lots of plans and advice in books and on the net about building smokehouses but so far I haven't built one. Instead I ordered a ready-made cold-smoker and didn't regret it. It was child's play to set up and burns for eight hours or more at a stretch, which is just what you want.

My first attempt to make smoked bacon, following a recipe from an apparently reputable modern source, was pretty awful. It was too salty and sweet for the smokey flavour to shine. Since then I have used a variety of curing recipes and curing times, and both the open and vac-packed methods. I have experimented with longer and shorter smoking times and noted how much more slowly the meat takes up the smoke when the weather is very cold, and/or very wet.

Come summer I shall be smoking at night when the temperature drops. And when autumn arrives, I shall be ready to cure and smoke a ham in time for Christmas.

Where to get your supplies:

The West Country Coldsmoker costs £232, including a starter kit of sawdust,  from West Country Stoves, 21 Creedy Road, Crediton, Devon, EX17 1EW. Telephone 01363 773557. www.coldsmoker.com

For organic and non-organic curing salt mixtures with instructions, small vacuum packing machines, sausage skins, and much else, you will find butchers' suppliers on line.  www.weschenfelder.co.uk  and www.sausagemaking.org are excellent.

If you are hooked on making your own smoked bacon, sooner or later, you will need a slicer. The Magimix Le Trancheur Pro 220, £99. is designed for domestic use.

Further reading:

From the surprisingly big selection of small books on the subject, I'd start with Keith Erlandson's Home Smoking and Curing, constantly in print since 1977 and recently re-issued in hardback by Ebury Press, £10. American A.D Livingston's highly readable Cold-Smoking & Salt-Curing Meat, Fish & Game, The Lyons Press,  (£10.95) deserves a place on every smoking enthusiast's bookshelf. For reassurance and the depth of her knowledge on curing matters, Jane Grigson's Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, Grub Street, £14.) makes delightful (though technically-dated) reading.

Photo above: Tara Fisher

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