Years ago, I read a description in a text, the name of which has long since been lost in my memory, of a cold smoker built into the hills of Appalachia. I’d never heard of such a thing. It had a small firebox in the ground that poured smoke into a horizontal chimney, also in the earth. From there, the smoke, now much colder (having bled a great deal of its heat into the soil), filled a small shack with its flavor-enhancing mist through a hole in the floor. It became one of those projects I just couldn’t let go.
Flavoring food with smoke, without having to time it perfectly, is a fantastic idea. While an apparatus of that size and scope is a decent undertaking, there are upsides of having it in your yard. Sometimes, friends come back from Alaska with more salmon than they can preserve. Sometimes, you wonder if the deer you took to the locker plant is the deer you got back, and what if you had cold-smoked it first
