And now for something completely different...

In the famous words of John Cleese I am straying from the path of beekeeping to focus on something completely different. What's so important to put beekeeping on the back burner you say? Food, glorious food.

You see, in complete honesty, if I was a woman I would want to have Alton Brown's baby or at the absolute minimum be married to him. For those who don't know who Alton Brown is, he is a Food Network chef who's television series "Good Eats" watches more like a Bill Nye: The Science Guy episode than a cooking show. On one hand he is a great cook and on the other a nerdy science geek, the combination of these two traits leads to a cooking show that explains why we do the things we do when cooking. As a slightly mad genius he is always coming up with basic, and cheap, alternatives that still adhere with what chemically needs to happening in cooking. This weekend I will be testing out one of his creations: the ceramic smoker.

BBQ, true BBQ unlike grilling that most people incorrectly think of as BBQ, is the low and slow cooking of tough meat with smoke to make it finger licking good. You can go out and purchase a smoker at a store for a few hundred dollars or you can follow these simple steps to create your own for under $100. According to my idol this cheaper alternative will do exactly the same job as one of those fancy $500 smokers. I have to decided to take up the challenge and will be the judge of this. In fairness everything else I've done under his tutelage has been true, so don't bet against me.

The Materials:

2 16" Terracotta flower pots - $45
3 Terracotta feet - $5
1 Hot Plate - $20
1 Heavy stainless steel pie plate -$4
1 14" Cooking grate - $14
1 Grilling/Candy Thermometer - $5

The premise is quite simple. Using two flower pots you create a thermally stable chamber which within you place your hot plate, the circular cooking grate rests above on it's own weight. Placing the wood chips in the pie plate creates the smoke as well as provides heat. The drainage holes in the flower pots provide a place to run the hot plate power cord at the bottom and to place to rest a thermometer on top.



Obtaining the materials was super easy, any large garden center (i.e. Home Depot/Rona) will have large terracotta pots. The largest at Home Depot was 20" however it was double the price of the 16", so in keeping with the cheap theme I got the 16" instead. The 14" cooking grate I got from my local BBQ store, it is a replacement grate for the 14" Weber Smokey Joe. The rest of the materials were purchased at Wal-Mart, does everyone else feel as guilty as I do purchasing all my cheap goods there?

Construction should also be as easy, however I managed to purchase a hot plate that was too big to fit in the bottom of my pot. It required a little McGyvering but I managed to take it all apart and get it threaded through the drainage hole to work, here's hoping I never have to BBQ in the rain. Once the hot plate was in it was just a matter of putting the pie plate on top, then the grate, then inverting the second flower pot.


Even after removing excess junk, the hot plate is still a tight fit.


I rigged the thermostat in a tuna can to keep it from causing any shorting issues.

Voila! A cheap smoker. I will let everyone know how it works, but I imagine I will be having all sorts of fun with it in the future; ribs, brisket, tenderloin, fish...the options are limitless.