So for a couple of years now I've been wanting to make a cold smoker, which if you aren't familiar with is way to create wood smoke and surround something (food) with it but keep that smoke at a very low temperature, which since you're heating the wood enough to smoke, can be tricky. Cheese is good example of something you want to cold smoke instead of BBQ.
I'd read several things online about some ingenious devices with metal dryer hoses, coolers filled with water, and precise measurements....then one day I ran across something genius in it's simplicity:
Take a can, put a hole in it, stick a soldering iron in the hole, and fill with wood chips. Plug in, and you're done. Yes, a cheap soldering iron heats up to the perfect temp, causing your wood chips (they have to be fairly small chips) to smoke, but the temperature is otherwise so low, that nothing else gets hot. So, last weekend, I set to it, and placed the hole in the SIDE of the can instead of the bottom, and arranged the element so that it would hang in the middle of the can, about 2" from the bottom. Then I just stuck it in the coal chamber of an old beat up Weber grill I had lying around, and put a couple of paper plates with cheese on top of the grate above it, plugged it in, and within around 5 minutes you'll see smoke, in 10 you'll have plenty to work with. You'll see in the pics there's plenty of smoke. After 15-20 minutes, the cheese has some smoke flavor, and I left much of it in there for another hour to if it might get hot, or impart more smoke to the cheese. The answer was no on both counts. Total cost: whatever you can find a cheap soldering iron for. Click on the small images below for larger versions.
