Cold Smoker For Cheese Recommendations?

[Sing_cheese]

Does anyone have any experience with buiding cold smokers for smoking cheese? I really want to try making smoked cheese and the liquid smoke route seems to chemical of a solution for me.  was thinking of buying a smoke genorator from the US and then building a cold smoke house. Seems like the easy but expensive route.  Any advice or thoughts would be welcome

Gerrit

[Cheese Head]

Gerrit, a member here named reg, made a lot of cheese and smoked store bought Provolone for the restaurents he worked in, sadly I have not seen him here for a while for you to ask questions.

[Tea]

Oops I just posted the same in another post.  Sorry for the double up.

[Cartierusm]

I usually just take my cheese into my theater and watch a movie and smoke a cigar...works for me. Sorry can't be any help. Basically you need to get the smoke to it without heat. SalMac has talked about building one at his Austrian Getaway, ask him.

[Cartierusm]

I've been thinking about this problem. The way I usually go about something like this is to do a search on the web and see if I can come up with some pictures of how professional do it and trying to reverse engineer it.

I've got a lot of experience with Distillation. Could you have a smoker and then a 4" pipe going out the top and going over to a container with the cheese in it, but on the 4" pipe have an outer pipe over the 4" as a still does with a condenser. Then run cold air or cold water in the pipe encasing the 4" pipe. This would be to cool the air thereby cooling the smoke so it doesn't melt the cheese. If this is not easy to understand I can make a picture.

[rockie900]

Just to make it simple I have used a grill kicker (www.grillkicker.com) in a cardboard box, they are good for about 20 mins. They put of pretty much no heat, not bad in my opinion. Havent tasted the cheese yet but will let you know when the time is right (about 6 months)

Al

[Sing_cheese]

Decided to go with a bradley smoke gnerator (uses preformed bricks of differnet woods) and will take the output from that and feed a yet to be constructed smoke cabinet.  From my research, the generator will put out almost air temp smoke, so I should be able to pipe it from the output into a rack filled smoking cabinet.  If need be I make sacrifice one of my older model wine fridges to smoking duty and be able to cool things further with that.  Although after using it as a smoker, I will have to dedicate that fridge for that use.

Gerrit

[merlin]

I don't know if any of you have ever caught Good Eats on the Food Network but he made a cold smoker out of an old school locker.  You should search the Food Network web site.  I've used a number of "things" that Alton has built.  You should give that a shot.

[Megan]

I added a mod. to my DHs grill, but a cheaper option that I've seen(online) is a two barrels, one for smoking, one for heating up your chips, connected by a tube.  Source of heat is a hot plate with a pie pan filled with wet chips, to keep your cheese cooler, it helps to put a wet cloth over the cheese or a bowl of water at the bottom of the smoking barrel.  Alton brown also had an episode on how to make your own liquid smoke.  Not to hard to make, but time consuming.
Megan

[Cheese Head]

Just to make it simple I have used a grill kicker (www.grillkicker.com) in a cardboard box, they are good for about 20 mins. They put of pretty much no heat, not bad in my opinion. Havent tasted the cheese yet but will let you know when the time is right (about 6 months)

Al

Hello Al, just realized you are new here on forum, welcome and thanks for the info/idea.

[Sing_cheese]

Built the cold smoker this weekend using a bradley smoke generator and a big Eskee.  Had made Mozerella, camambert and blue camembert (have no idea if any mold will grow on the camemberts or what strange taste they will have but had alot of wheels so why not try?).

The fresh smoked Moz was/is great. We smoked them for about 2.5 hours and while strong (am told they will mellow in a day or two), tasted really great with Tomato and Basil.

Will post recipes and futher results time permitting.

Gerrit

[Tea]

drool    that looks wonderful.  What flavour did you smoke them?

[Cartierusm]

Wow looks good, keep up the good work.

[Likesspace]

That is beyond cool.
Keep us posted on how they taste.

Dave

[Sing_cheese]

Tea,

I did these with Hickory.  Also did some tofu as well.  Had a great dinner with the Moz, tomato and basil and the tofu with mushrooms.  Rarely in my cheesemaking have I had such instant gratification.  On to smoking gouda (if I can get it right) and cheddar later this week.

Gerrit