Smokin'......!

We picked up a smoker at the weekend as a reward for finishing our Xmas shopping. It's a stainless steel box with a lid and two racks - the idea is that you sprinkle sawdust on the base of the box, put meat or fish on the racks, put the lid on and then place it over a dish filled with flaming methylated spirits. The sawdust smokes cooks the steak.

I wasn't sure how efficient the cooking would be so I tried it out with steak marinated in lemon juice last night, figuring that if it's undercooked it's not going to kill us and we can always slap it on the barbie to finish off.

Fire, meat and a beer close to hand - how happy can a man get? The burner is on the base of our brazier, which I'd flipped upside down so the smoker wasn't sitting on a lip and was instead flush to the base. This turned out to be a blunder.

  All set up and ready to smoke

It turned out that it actually cooked pretty quickly, the flame was bigger than expected. Note to self - do not cook near flammable objects. The intense flame on the near corner of the box is from the rubber foot on the base of the brazier. Oops. 

After 20 mins I noticed the fire had gone out, but by then the steak was already cooked (if not a bit overcooked).  Surprisingly effective!

Another blunder was using the lower rack in the smoker, so the meat was only half an inch or so above the sawdust. As the fat dripped off the steak onto the base of the smoker it spat and blew bits of half-burnt charcoal over the bottom of the steak. I needed to wash them before we could eat.

Despite my blunders but the steak came out juicy, smokey and really tasty. There's a whole raft of different sawdusts, teas and foliage out there to give different flavours so I'm looking forward to some experimentation over the coming months.