Smoke
September 21st, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in eating local
An invitation to dinner at our friends Luke and Ashley’s house last night turned into a lesson in smoking our Spy Dog Farm Freedom Ranger broilers.
Apparently, Luke woke up that morning inspired to build his own smoker. He just happened to have an old wood stove on hand. So he dug a fire pit in the back yard–that’s in the lower right-hand corner of the photo, covered with a steel trash can lid–then dug a trench for a length of stove pipe (under that plank of wood). Where the pipe emerges with an elbow from the ground at the other end, Luke tipped the wood stove on its back side and attached it to the elbow.
The smoke from the hickory wood burning in the hole travels through the pipe underground and into the stove. Genius!
Luke’s a carpenter by trade, so he’s pretty handy. When we arrived at cocktail hour (aka “drink o’clock”), there was already a fire raging in the hole and smoke pouring out of the wood stove. Inside were two of our Freedom Rangers, hanging on hooks attached to an improvised metal crossbar. Under the chickens was a small grate where Luke was also smoking some pork chops supplied by our friend Mike’s pigs.
Since the inside of the stove gets nowhere near hot enough to actually cook the chickens or the pork chops–only about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, according to my instant-read thermometer–Luke also had a fire going in his Weber grill to finish the meat. I helped him spatch-cock the birds, cutting out the backbones with a heavy scissors and splaying the chickens open.
We then gathered around the smoke pit with our cocktails and popcorn and noshed on pork chops before sitting down to a fabulous dinner of Luke’s smoked chicken.
Are you now inspired to build your own smoker? Think of the things you can make with it–like your own bacon, for instance.
There’s just no end to the lengths people will go to to make great food.
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