Store Meat Up to 2 Years in your Smoke House

Old Tried and True Smoke House Tech

Old Polish Smokehouse

The eastern part of Poland (what is now Lithuania) became very famous for its smoked products. There was a popular square tower shaped smokehouse with a side of 6.5 foot (2 m) and 20 ft (6 m) in height. The fire pit was located outside and a trench was delivering smoke into the smokehouse. The top part of the tower contained screened openings that provided ventilation and a means for the smoke to escape. Those openings had hinged covers on the outside and allowed smoke control by serving as a damper. Due to its height and a separate fire pit, the smokehouse was able to provide natural cold smoke. This is the best possible design for a smokehouse, and is reflected in hundreds of home made smokers or industrial units. They all employ a separately standing fire pit/smoke generator.

There is an image at that link.

There is also another nice European design where you have a two story building with a fireplace, and you build a smoker on the second floor, and tap into the chimney, with a smoke pipe into the box and one back into the chimney. But the drawback is that whatever you burn in your fireplace smokes your meat. So you need to be careful about that.

But at least its convenient, since you would be using a wood stove every day, connecting into its smoke pipe would be easy even with a wall cabinet beside it that serves as a smoke house in miniature.

You should not underestimate the need for a smoker to preserve and store meat. Salt and sugar are also needed.
Storing meat in salt alone is messy business where you have to pack it in barrels in salt, using more salt than meat. And the finished product has to be soaked to remove the salt before cooking.

With smoked meats, you don't have to overdo the salt. And it tastes so good too if you do it right.

Here is a smaller more modern one...
animalscience.uconn.edu...

But I would think most people could build a nice one if they had to and had some good plans.
I say go with the tried and true Polish model, they make great smoked meats.

Here are some plans for smokehouses like described, as well as many other useful plans.

Smokehouse

Barrel Smokehouse

LSU AG


Click through the sub-topics on the right for more plans.

I have most of them saved on my computer.

Originally posted by Sostratus
Here are some plans for smokehouses like described, as well as many other useful plans.

Smokehouse

Barrel Smokehouse

LSU AG


Click through the sub-topics on the right for very useful plans.

I have most of them saved on my computer.

After reading some of the stuff on that site I figured it was so useful that I saved the entire website. About 20 MB. When the SHTF lets face it, hunger has a way of getting you to start building your smoke house so knowing what you are doing will be important.

Some basic tips I found there,
alder or fruit wood - fish and poultry
oak and hickory - beef and pork

Cold smoking over a 14 day period will preserve your meat longer by removing the moisture.

reply to post by Rocketman7


Yep - lot's of information.

Btw - how do you save a whole site?

Originally posted by Sostratus
reply to post by Rocketman7

 

Yep - lot's of information.

Btw - how do you save a whole site?

I am glad you asked. Its great info to share in situations like this. Here you have a site, that is really going to be helpful in a crunch. People should get the smokers going the minute the deep freeze is thawing.
And this site could make you a valuable person in any SHTF community since you would know how to smoke meat and make sausages and you could almost make a trade out of it.

So to save this website, so you can browse it off-line you need a program that can download websites.

So the one I use is free, but it has one flaw. It works perfectly the first time you use it, so every time you use it, you need to reinstall it. Just reinstall it over the previous install thats ok, its a tiny program. So it takes less than a minute to install. And the reason it is worthwhile doing is because as a for instance it will download that entire site and mirror it on your hard drive so when you click on a link it works just like on-line.

And it will download the site in 2 minutes with a good cable connection. So 2 to 5 minutes and you have the website wheras if you were to save each page to disk, that would take you hours, and it wouldn't have the right links to surf it off-line.

Here is the one I use and as I say it works flawlessly the first time, the second time mine has configuration problems, so I just reinstall it every time.

Windows Website Downloader

reply to post by Rocketman7


Freakin Amazing - You need to open a thread on how to download Websites!

- It worked flawlessly - Thanks!

reply to post by Rocketman7

Store Meat Up to 2 Years in your Smoke House

S&F!

One of the oldest, most tried & true methods of storing meat w/out refrigeration...