Homemade Sausage Making

i just bought this stainless steel smoker for a song, plan to use it for cold and some hot smoking. Its a gas smoker but I have an electric element and controler that I'm going to use. Its 4 ft high by 24 inches deep by 18 inches wide (265 cm x60cm x45cm) It has one adjustable damper 7 inches(18 cm) from the top but none at the bottom, but has a good size hole in the bottom where the gas hose enters.

-should i have an air vent at the bottom or should i close it up?
-should i close it up and put in an adjustable vent at the bottom?

Just some simple observations for you. if you have an outlet but no inlet there can be no flow through. If you heat wood with an electric heater you can generate smoke and wood gas in the chamber and it will pressurize the chamber if it is completely unvented. If you allow for some air flow you will also be allowing the escape of water vapor and other gases that need to be absent. So I would keep the vents top and bottom and fashion dampers for each.

Hi Glen,
Ross is correct, you must have air/smoke flowing from bottom to top. Keep the smoke in the cabinet too long and your sausages will become sooty. Adjustable in and outlets are very important to produce superior smoked foods.
Good Luck,
Jan.

I agree with all of the above.

Also, the placement of the thermometer between the vents may not be very accurate. If the wind is blowing into the vents it could make for a bad reading, also, if the vent I'm seeing is the only top side vent the heat may have a tendency to concentrate there.

Just a side note, the wood gas that Ross referred to, it can go boom if concentrated.....

Charlie

CrankyBuzzard wrote:
also, if the vent I'm seeing is the only top side vent the heat may have a tendency to concentrate there.

Charlie

I wondered about the top vent, it seemed like a screwy placement. Would i benefit from making a stack /damper of some sort on the roof and closing off the front one?

Glen,
Personally I would close up the vents I see in the door on the top end. Make a smoke stack with an adjustable plate to regulate the out going smoke. The bottom vents must be adjustable also so you will find a happy medium to smoke correctly. If you don't experiment with the inlet/outlet sizes, you will finish up with sooty smoked foods.
Start to smoke with the bottom vent 1/2 open and the top vent 3/4 open and you will succeed.
Good Luck,
Jan.

My approach to this would be to brine a chicken and smoke it in the cabinet as it is and see how it works. Considering that any enclosure can and probably has been used as a smoker this will likely work very well as it is.

This salmon:
Started out like this :
In this smoker:

This salmon:
Started out like this :
In this smoker:

ssorllih wrote:My approach to this would be to brine a chicken and smoke it in the cabinet as it is and see how it works. Considering that any enclosure can and probably has been used as a smoker this will likely work very well as it is.

Yep yep!

The exhaust where it is may not be a bad thing from a smoke standpoint, I was only looking at the placement of the thermometer...

Chicken is always a good test subject since they are cheap and they definitely let you know when they are over or under smoked/cooked.

Charlie

Is there some avantage to having a chimney vs just putting a damper vent in the top of the smoker?

A chimney is purpose made to increase the air flow to the fire. If you need that then make a chimney. but a fire built on the ground in the open works quite well with no chimney.

Glen,
The only reason I had chimneys on my smokers is that they always are in the open.
A chimney makes them weather/rain proof, at least mine are.
Another reason is that there will be no stale smoke in the top, if you have outlets below the top of the smoker you have a greater possibility of stale smoke and soot building up on your products.
Good Luck,
Jan.

Where/how do the majority of you veterans place the sensor/thermometer in your smokers? I use a 12 inch probe style just pushed in like Rytek shows in one of his books. I don't feel like I get accurate reads.

Dunno about the "veteran" classification because I still have a lot to learn. (...tinker with.)

My best answer as to temperature probe placement is, place it where it's representative, and make sure that flow is well-mixed.

First, make sure the smoker cabinet's smoke flow is well mixed, meaning that it works with natural convection to make sure that smoke is evenly distributed. (Fancy way of saying, "Hot air rises, and be sure to throttle it to your advantage.") This amounts to controlling smoke flow by mounting the smoke exit high and constricting it slightly to control smoke and humidity. Don't have lots of vents along the flow path, because at every place that air is introduced or smoke/humidity is released, the composition past (above) that point will be different.

Then, assuming the smoke is well mixed by the time it moves up, away from the air/smoke entrance, past the meat, and gets to the exit, the smoke temperature and contents should be representative of the upper part of the cabinet. Locating the temperature sensor just before the gas stream exit is probably the best location. However, there's something to be said for monitoring the gas stream entering the meat zone, too. You don't want it to be too hot.

I tend to go nuts and place a temperature probe in one of the sausages (for Internal Meat Temperature, "IMT") as well as one in the exit smoke stream, just ahead of the outlet. Then, I place one in the smoke, down just below the meat. ...yup, overkill, I know. But my results improved greatly when I started monitoring both smoke temperature and IMT. (I also log ambient air temperature, measured separately.)

My smoker is a gas one, but I smoke sausages with an external smoke source and an electric element so I can keep a nice, low, controllable temperature. The bottom is fairly open because of the gas burner, which just sits there for sausage smoking. I control smoke flow with a single top/rear vent.

...and that's one man's opinion. Tinker. Enjoy.