JamesF

From the website it looks as though the cure and seasoning contain salt, sodium nitrite, sugar and lemon pepper. I can't see that's likely to have degraded much. The pepper might not be quite as zingy as it once was, but otherwise I think it should be fine. James

This time next year Rodney, we'll be millionaires! James

My completed tea light "spoon" James

Test run of around an hour completed today. It was a bit tricky to get things started as the wind is still gusting a fair bit. Living on top of a hill doesn't help I also spent another fifteen minutes in the workshop bodging up this from a scrap of galvanised steel sheet. Not a brilliant photo, so perhaps its purpose is clearer here: I know the usual hack is to put a screw through the side of the tea light, but I've not found that very satisfactory. My experience is that they start leaking around the screw, or the screw comes loose and the tea light flops about. The actual tea light containers appear to be barely any better than tinfoil these days. It's a huge improvement, but not quite perfect as the entire thing conducts heat quite well and gets as hot as the wax. I think the next stage is to fold a "step" into the handle part and use it as a tang to fit a small piece of dowel on for a heatproof handle. James

Thank you. I do have a couple of racks with smaller spacing but I need to take the angle grinder to them first. Clearly they came from a slightly larger oven I like the idea of using the mesh though. We have some sheets so I'll give them a go. James

I have to keep my ProQ Eco smoker in the greenhouse because, fairly obviously, it honks of smoke, which doesn't go down too well with the lady of the house if it is left indoors. The greenhouse specifically because I'm the only one who goes in there, so no-one is going to go piling stuff on top of it or anything like that. Unfortunately it seems that some snails developed a bit of a taste for cardboard over the last few months and the box is no longer as sound as it once was. Over the Christmas period I have therefore been scavenging in my scrap wood piles, hunted down a few other bits and pieces that I'd put to one side because I knew I'd find a use for them one day, and have come up with this, absolutely no expense spent. The standard ProQ smoke generator slides into the wooden runners at the bottom and since taking the photos I've added some supports for the drip tray. Overall it has a capacity of around 100 litres, probably about the same as a fairly standard UK electric oven which may not come as a great surprise given that an oven is where the racks came from If the weather calms down a bit I shall attempt an empty test run tomorrow and if that's successful we'll be buying cheese to smoke over the weekend. James

It's doing ok so far. I am slightly concerned that in a longer smoke (when I recently did some salmon) overnight, the outer cardboard tube felt slightly damp in the morning when there had been no rain, but it seemed to dry out ok once I'd put it back in the greenhouse (where I'm keeping it for the time being as it still smells too much of smoke to want to keep in the house). For what it is I certainly can't complain about how it performs, but I can see a day coming in the not too distance future when I'll build my own cabinet, possibly to fit the racks etc. that are in the eco smoker. The one possible niggle not specific to the eco smoker is the use of the tea light to start the dust burning. I've seen the trick with putting a screw into the side to be able to move it in and out and used that, but then found that when it burnt down far enough the wax leaked out around the screw. It's also a bit awkward to get lit if there's any kind of breeze (usually the case around here as we're on quite an exposed site). I'm thinking I might 3D-print a holder for the tea light to make it easier to slide in and out, and perhaps chop a piece out of the side of a tin can to allow it to be used as a shield whilst lighting the candle. Oh, I have also discovered that tea lights are not all the same size. Some of ours are too tall and won't fit James

And here's the result. Taste is perhaps just a little too smoky at the moment on the outside, so although it's at the bottom end of the desired weight loss I'm not going to put it back in the smoker for any longer. Perhaps it would have been more had the air temperature not dropped quite so low when it was smoking (it was -4.6°C at dawn, according to the weather station). It feels dry though, and the pieces are firm but tender. I'm going to give it a couple of days in the fridge to allow the smoke to diffuse through the flesh and try it again. Might have it for lunch with some scrambled eggs from the chickens. James

Not really sure what I'm doing here, but my wife came back from Lidl this morning with an extra 500g of salmon fillet cut into three strips. Apparently it was due to turn toxic and kill anyone who so much as looked at it as soon as the clock strikes midnight tomorrow and they were getting rid of it cheap, so she thought she'd buy it for me to experiment with. I'm thinking a salt/sugar cure for tomorrow, then rinse and dry it and leave it overnight in the fridge and aiming for perhaps ten hours in the cold smoker the following day. Not decided what wood to use yet either. James

I thought I'd give some apple-smoked halloumi a go today (together with a couple of pieces of spare cheddar). I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, to be honest. I patted the cheese dry before cutting it into smaller blocks and putting them in the smoker, but by the time I took them out after three hours they'd got a bit "sweaty" again. Enough to leave obvious moisture marks on the chopping board I put them on when I took them out. Before and after: I'm wondering if it might be better to take the halloumi out of its packet and just leave it open in the fridge overnight before smoking or something like that. James

Cool. Background about the reason for sale is always helpful. Another interest of mine has a reasonably active used market for items with four-figure values and the level of attempted scamming is quite unbelievable so I'm always very cagey about near identical ads, especially from posters with little or no history. James

You know, when I read this post from a first-time poster and then look at this one from just a couple of months back, I can't help feeling that there's something not quite kosher going on.

The local butcher sells an apple-smoked cheddar, so we're definitely going to compare the two in a few weeks time. I'm quite excited by the prospect. I think I'd say that if you aren't able to make a small smoker yourself and/or you need something that can be packed away when it's not being used then the eco smoker is probably not a bad choice. If you have the skills to build your own then I'm not so sure as compromises have obviously had to be made to achieve the goals of creating a low-price smoker cabinet that would encourage people to try it out. For instance, having to open up the top and lift out the trays every time you want to load/unload it will clearly lead to wear and tear over time. The flap at the bottom sometimes pops open on mine, too so control of the air flow is a bit irregular and smoke does leak out from gaps around the folds and tabs. Ideally it also needs to be kept indoors to prevent the cardboard getting damp or being damaged, but the smoky smell is a bit too much to want in the house for a while after the smoking is done. I've left mine in the greenhouse for a few days to "air" before bringing it back indoors. I'd be quite apprehensive about trying an overnight smoke, too. Those issues could be eliminated in a DIY version. The other "compromise" of course is that you can't use it for hot smoking, but we know it's not intended for that in the first place. None of which is intended as any particular criticism of the product. I think it achieves what's intended and I'm happy to have been given it. It's plenty big enough to try out smoking bacon and fish as long as you don't get too ambitious size-wise and I reckon it could quite easily keep up with cheese consumption for the average family as well as being able to try a few other things too. I'm already looking forward to my next attempt. Some sort of fish is definitely quite tempting. Haddock certainly appeals. I do enjoy a nice kedgeree. James

Just kicked off the second attempt using apple dust. Only I don't have all the cheese in that I'd planned. Some of it has "disappeared" from the fridge and no-one seems to know where... James

All done now. Before and after a smidge over three hours in the smoker... The pieces on the right are Tesco own-brand extra mature cheddar and on the left is Pilgrim's Choice mature cheddar. I can't say I really know what they're like even before smoking as we normally buy our cheese from the local butcher (where else?). The smoke generator didn't burn as far as I expected. This was after a little over three hours with ProQ's beech dust. The blocks of cheese are now in the fridge and tomorrow evening I'll vacuum pack them. If it doesn't rain I might also have a go with a different flavour of wood dust and the remainder of the cheese (above is only half of what I bought). My preference is to try apple, but if the rest of the family clearly vote for something different then I'll go with that instead. James

Turns out I needn't have worried. After an hour and a half there's smoke coming out of every possible gap in the smoker (I do wonder if it should just be from the "chimney" hole, but I don't think I can do much to stop it getting out around the edges of the top of the box short of draping something over them). The dust has burnt along one leg of the spiral so far, which is a bit slower than the suggestions I've read for the speed of the burn, but perhaps it just took a while to get going properly. I'll have a quick peek in another hour and see how it's doing then. James

It's not an ideal day, being 14°C and a bit breezy, but I was determined to try my new ProQ eco smoker out today and if I wait until it's cold enough, not windy and not raining I'll probably still be hanging around next New Year's Day. I bought some cheddar yesterday -- just whatever I could find cheap in Tesco in case it doesn't go well first time out -- and have put about half of it in the smoker, cut into blocks of about 100g. I'm using beech dust that came with the smoker, but only filled the outside of the smoke generator because I'm not going to need the full burn time. The smoke generator was a bit tricksy to get lit, quite probably because of the breeze, but it seemed to be going when I put it in the smoker. I'll check after an hour to see if it's still going. I think we have a cook's blowtorch somewhere if all else fails. Perhaps I need to think about making up a small shield just to get the generator going. James

14.5°C here (West Somerset, a stone's throw from the edge of Exmoor). Very comfortable to be outdoors in short sleeves. Much the same is forecast for tomorrow so I plan to be outside again, making my first ever home-smoked food. Bought a couple of different varieties of cheddar today specifically for the purpose. James

I have access to basically as much sycamore as I can cut down, so it's an obvious thing to investigate whether it is any use for smoking. Searching on the interwebs brings up loads of forum posts saying it's not suitable because it's a softwood (not last time I looked, I'm sure) or it's poisonous (seeds/seedlings may be for horses, but I can't find any other evidence for sycamore being toxic), it produces very thick, foul smoke when burnt (not in my experience) or just saying that it shouldn't be used. This strikes me as slightly odd given that sycamore is actually part of the maple family, and maple is often used for smoking. Which actually reminds me that another reason given for not using sycamore was that it is too sappy, but if sugar maple is used (as it appears to be) then perhaps that's not a good reason either. I'm coming to the conclusion that there may be some confusion over tree names that's possibly led to a misunderstanding. Most of the search results I came across appear to be US-based and after digging around a bit, it looks like in the US "sycamore" usually refers to Platanus occidentalis, a variety of plane tree, whereas in the UK it is Acer pseudoplatanus, Acer being the maple family. Wikipedia suggests that the latter is known as "sycamore maple" in the US. I suspect it's possible that some people in the UK have read the common name on US sites and repeated the information without realising that it may be a completely different tree. In fact, Acer pseudoplatanus doesn't even seem to be that widespread in the US. Can anyone offer any more definitive information? James

You're absolutely right: Richard Osman's new "Thursday Murder Club" book. How did you know? Err, no, actually At my wife's suggestion my in-laws gave me a ProQ eco smoker. I've been meaning to set up some sort of smoker for years, but you know, life, children, work, that sort of stuff... I was also given Jo Hampson's "Smoking Food at Home" and Jake Levin's Smokehouse Handbook which kept me occupied whilst half the Atlantic seemed to be falling on my particular patch of West Somerset. Anyhow, as soon as the weather dries out a bit I shall be trying a few things. Probably cheese and some garlic from the veggie plot first, but I also have a few chickens that are shortly due to head towards the freezer so I might have to see if I can do anything with some of those. One thing I will absolutely have to do is smoke some more chiles specifically to smoke. Once I have a bit of experience with cold smoking then I'll look at building a hot smoker as well. I'm not sure how long the eco-smoker will last given that it's just cardboard, but I can quite easily knock up a new box if necessary and I just happen to have some racks from a dead oven that would allow me to make a slightly larger one. James