Cold smoking with a 3-in-1 Charcoal BBQ Smoker

A couple of months ago, I picked up a 3-in-1 Charcoal BBQ Smoker from Kogan, for what seemed a pretty reasonable $75.  It's a handy little unit, looking a little like a black R2D2.

3-in-1 Smoker and Inkbird Thermometer

In early trials, I did have trouble with the built-in thermometer, which didn't seem to register the fire within. Rather than sending me a replacement thermometer, Kogan refunded $30, which suited me fine.

Without temperature control, I couldn't really have a crack at hot-smoking, not having visibility of either meat or head-space temperatures.  So, parlayed the $30 (plus a little more) into an Inkbird IBT-6X thermometer ($72 in total from eBay).

This digital unit has sockets for six leads, of which four were a part of this package.  This allows scope for two meat probes, and two ambient probes, ideal for a two-level unit such as this.

BBQ Go

And the Bluetooth-enabled app "BBQ Go" monitors all the probes, setting alarm ranges and default targets for a variety of meats. Pretty happy about this.

On the weekend, decided to see how it assisted cold-smoking. As a relative newby to smoking, my early aims are to understand the dynamic of the fire-setting and coal quantities/arrangements, for specific time frames (e.g. a 2-hour smoke).  Once I get this under the belt, I'll start looking into cranking up the coal volumes, to get a better sense of how coal consumption and heat levels change over time. This, I believe, is vital for any serious long-haul hot-smoke attempt e.g. brisket or pork-belly.  I hope to generate some sort of saw-tooth curve of temperature over time, which then allows the proactive lighting and supply of additional coals, keeping the heat in the target range.

Small stack of coals.

But for now, cold-smoke.

For this I'm using a small amount of coal, perhaps 6-8 medium pieces lit by fire starters. I'd like to keep the temperature to a minimum, but still maintain enough glow to ignite the wood chips (Applewood, incidentally, soaked in water for 20 minutes).

After 20 or so minutes of burn, we're ready to go.

The 3-in-1 has quite a few components:  bottom bowl for coals, middle bowl for water (acting as heat sink, humidifier, and drip tray), two grills and a hanging rod in the lid.

But today, I don't need heat control, extra humidity, or a drip tray.  We'll leave the water bowl out.

The plan is to smoke some almonds, and also some mushrooms.

I'll detail the almond preparation recipe in another post, but 400g were put on the lower rack, and the fresh mushrooms on the top.  My theory being the lower rack (minus the water bowl) will get more radiant heat from the coals, and I want to minimise any drying to the mushrooms. So they're on top, and almonds on bottom.

Almonds below, mushrooms above,
and two probes for the temperature.

Lid on, throw a couple of larger chips onto the red coals, and see what happens.

One slight problem with a cheap BBQ Smoker is the somewhat hit-and-miss seal between the components.  Further, there is no control of the air input, only the air output in the lid.

So after a while, there's a fair bit of smoke billowing from all orifices.  The temperature seem to peak at no more that 75C on the lower rack, and 65C on the top.

Whenever the unit stopped leaking smoke, I added more wood chips through the lower of two access doors.

After about 90 minutes, the internal temperatures were down to about 40-45C, and there was little glow left to smoke the remaining chips, so time to decamp the contents, and clean up.

So, to date I have yet to really pack in the coals into the unit for a hot smoke, so not sure how this will all unfold.  But it would seem that a 90-120 minute cold smoke is quite manageable with only small amounts of coal and chips, leaving the food uncooked, and providing a mild-to-medium smoking effect.

As it turned out, the almonds are lightly flavoured with smoke (not as heavy as the salty packaged ones in the supermarket), but great as a pre-dinner snack.

The mushrooms were later sauteed with red onion to provide an accompaniment to BBQ pork steaks.  Worked pretty well.

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