Cold Smoking on the Big Green Egg

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While the Big Green Egg is amazing at cooking and smoking while hot, a lot of people will tell you that you can’t cold smoke on it, pure nonsense. 

The Big Green Egg makes a superb cold smoker. 

To cold smoke you don’t want temperatures to reach more than 30 degrees Celcius and preferably you would keep it cooler than this at 20C or below. Therefore the UK is a perfect place to smoke foods as long as you can generate cool smoke and the EGG is a great smoking vessel. 

There are many products on the market that are designed to be a perfect cold smoker. The Bradley Smoker can be hooked up with one of their own cold smoke generators for example. However these are expensive to run, several times more expensive per hour, and if you already own a Big Green Egg then why would you buy one of these?

I’ve seen a second smaller Big Green Egg being used in a standard smoking configuration but hooked up via a tumble drier hose to a large Big Green Egg. The hose allows the smoke to cool before being fed in through the draft door of the large Big Green Egg. This setup works but isn’t pretty. 

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The simplest and most effective system to use with your Big Green Egg is the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator. This is a very simply designed piece of kit that allows different wood dusts to smoulder, generating smoke but not huge amounts of heat. The ProQ Cold Smoke Generator is cheap to buy, cheap to run and really simple to use. It works perfectly.

There are various different flavours of wood you can buy and it’s cheap. HotSmoked.co.uk are the best place to buy these in the UK along with their Wood Dust Packs. You only really need the small generator as opposed to the Artisan Cold Smoke Generator. 

I use mine to make some beautiful bacon, smoked salmon and smoked cheese.

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© Nic Williams 2014