Everything smells

Especially when you already have a scent firmly embedded in your nose, and that is probably also in your clothes.

Yesterday I ran the smoker again, smoking some more cheese, salami, chorizo, a couple of steaks and a bacon joint. The sweetish smell had got into the house this morning, even before I went out to empty it after running overnight, and once the stuff was in the kitchen then all of downstairs seemed to be filled with the smell. Sat here at my desk at work, I can still catch the scent from time to time.

This time I tried oak to begin with. Normally the dust smoulders for 10-15 hours, but the oak dust burned through in around 3-4 hours, so I reloaded about half the spiral with some beech and ran it  overnight.

Food done this way lasts a long time, both in terms of reduced spoilage and because the intense flavours allow less to be used. Last week I finished the last piece of salami that was smoked back in October, by which time it had thoroughly dried (just like real salami should be) to a hard, reddish material that offered resistance to cutting and biting, rather than just greasily squidging out of the way as wet salami often does. In this case the red colour comes from paprika, included in the salami by the maker. At some stage I need to try this with saucisson, hopefully with the smoke overpowering the slight rotten meat taste that an air-cured sausage sometimes has.

Jam isn't my thing, but these are the kind of preserves I could live on. :-)