Smoking meat in a survival situation

E

evbouret

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Aug 1, 2007
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How many of you know how to construct a smoker and smoke their own meat? I think this is a crucial skill to learn if you were stuck somewhere.

All a smoker needs to do is hold smoke. It can even be constructed from a cardboard box (cold smoke) or a trash can. Smokers can be made much like a debris shelter. Put a small opening for the smoke to escape, you might have to play with the hole size to get the smoke filling the chamber nicely. Put a small fire right to the side of the smoker and have a ditch dug into the bottom of the smoker. Line the top of the trench with sticks and cover with soil. Next you need an object large enough to cover the fire pit (thick bark, log, rock etc...). And that's it. Next you need to shoot or snare something...:cool:
 
evbouret,
I just smoked 3 racks of pork ribs on Sunday. I'm on my third smoker and have a lot more patience now, than with my first one.

For survival, the most simple approach is to smoke meat by hanging it high enough over the fire that it doesn't cook too fast. If you have the time and material, as you stated above, you can make an enclosure to help contain the smoke.

I'll add a few bits from my experiences smoking meat.

- Don't use evergreen wood to smoke with. It's acidic and gives quite a pungeant acrid taste to the meat. Actually any resonous tree will make the meat unedible.

-Be careful using other woods that can be toxic or poisonous. It goes without saying, don't smoke your meat using poison ivy! :barf:
Small specimen plants in a lanscaped area can be anywhere from foul tasting to poisonous. personally, I would avoid using any scrub tree or bush. If there is any fungus growing on the wood, do not use it!

-My conservative advice is stick with familiar hardwoods. Oak is great! Cherry, Apple, Peach all good. Hickory smoking is among the most famous, by name, but, it is easy to Over-smoke something with too much hickory.
A little hickory goes a long way in the taste department.

Remove the bark whenever possible. in a widlerness situation it's not like we will be able to cut down a 100 year Oak tree and use only heartwood, but, get rid of any bark, rotten areas, or anything else that looks funky.

-Temperature: I do most of my smoking at about 225 degrees F. or as close as I can control the fire to that point. For a single example, it took 5.5 hours to smoke the rib racks. Grilling is High Heat/Short Time, Smoking is Low Heat /Long Time.

-A teepee made from sticks can be enough to contain the smoke in order to smoke meat. In most wilderness survival cases, we will probably be hanging the meat high enough over the fire that it doesn't cook too fast. Continue to add wood to keep the smoke rising. It doesn't have to be huge plumes of smoke, in fact, when BBQing, they say the smoke should not be smoking like a steam train.

-If any meat is in question of being fresh or not, then I would suggest grilling it, use the high intense heat to kill any bad stuff. Save smoking for known good, fresh kill meat. Smoking meat will allow you longer storage, but, still, I would suggest you reheat it before eating, whenever possible, to be on the safe side.
 
Oh man......I was almost to scared to open this thread. Curiosity got the best of me though. Thank God its not what I thought.:eek::o
 
Great thread - would like to try this, but need some more info if I could impose a little.

How can you tell when you have smoked it long enough?
How do you store it once it is smoked properly in a survival situation?
 
any chance for pics of the process and setup you use? im very curious and would like to try it out.
 
2008.11.25.R0017123.JPG


This is a great thread. I've never tried one in the field but I built this thing last week.
Pork rib is being smoked there. I'll post finished thing later ;)
 
j williams said:
Oh man......I was almost to scared to open this thread. Curiosity got the best of me though. Thank God its not what I thought.:eek::o
Click to expand...

Yeah, as long as we don't start talking prison survival strategies I think we're okay.

I was also afraid to open this thread...

But you know the drive to survive is strong in a guy, and I guess you might surprise youself if you had to do it or die!
 
I use a side-firebox smoker that separates the fire from the cooking chamber.
If the flame were directly underneath, the meat would cook from direct flame and heat (grilling) too fast to be smoked. Tink of smoking as Slow Cooking.
Slow Cooking can break down tougher cuts of meat, the fibers and muscle to make it more tender.
example:
images


The box on the right side is the fire box, the larger chamber is the smoking/cooking chamber. This is a nice type of smoker for home use.
But we are not at home, we are in a SHTF/Canoe Overturned/Lost our gear/ Lost in the Wilderness survival situation. Sorry to burst your bubble of backyard grillin with a cold beer. :D

In the wilderness we would have to get pretty elaborate and/or expend a lot of energy to build a smoker that could contain deent sized pieces of meat. What we would need is an expediant way to smoke the meat, that doesn't take many hours to construct, because it can take hours to do the cooking anyway.

A Dokata Pit fire might give what you need for smoking, but I have no experience with them, except for what I have read and pictures I have seen.

Here is a very crude drawing of what I had in mind:
Smoking meat.jpg


It is a standard 3-pole set-up over your fire, but you make a sort of teepee at the top, to help gather and route the smoke around the meat before it goes skyward. Easy to construct. The important part would be that the poles are high enough and/or the fire is burning low enough, that it doesn't cook the food too quickly.

At home you would use a meat thermometer, or by experience, to know when the meat is done. It should be warm in the middle. You will see a visible smoke ring extending form the outer portion of the meat inward. It is pinkish in color, which sometimes leads people to think the meat is still rare. the smoke ring should be at least 1/4" thick into the meat, but more is fine, isn't going to hurt it.
The smokey outer layer/crust is the first line of defense against bacteria.

For practice, You can use a standard grill, like a weber, to smoke meat. Just get a piece of sheet metal (not galvanized, yuck!) and build a small fire off to one side, and use the sheet metal to partition the flames away from the meat. Place the meat on the other side, and cook as slowly as you can.
Add woodchips as necessary to keep the warmth and smoke going. you can use a large coffee can to contain the fire, , but i would "burn it off" to get rid of any paint or writing printed on it before using it in the grill.

Chicken pieces are good to start with, as it doesn't take near as long as a big gnarly hunk of Pork. It usually takes me about 1.5 hours to smoke chicken breasts and thighs, maybe a little longer. Using the Weber method it'll be shorter since the fire is in the same box with the meat. Use an instant meat thermometer to check the chicken parts for done-ness.
Most thermometers will have an accompnaying chart showing beef, pork, chicken recommended temps.
 
Maybe I've been under a misconception for a long time. I always understood the reason smoking was used for preserving meat (in an outdoors environment) was to keep flies etc. from laying eggs on/in the meat while drying.

So, in other words, the smoking was not intended to preserve the meat, the drying was.

Am I wrong?

Doc
 
there's cold smoking and hot smoking. One doesn't cook, one does.

Personally, while I can do both, and love to make some good cold smoked jerky, it's not top of my list for a survival scenario of less than homesteading proportions. Good to know, yes. Core skill, not so much. Has to do with survival scenarios, temperature, game sie, and ability to bring game down.
 
DOC-CANADA said:
Maybe I've been under a misconception for a long time. I always understood the reason smoking was used for preserving meat (in an outdoors environment) was to keep flies etc. from laying eggs on/in the meat while drying.

So, in other words, the smoking was not intended to preserve the meat, the drying was.

Am I wrong?

Doc
Click to expand...

Doc, you are probably right, I was thinking more of smoking (as a form of cooking) it to keep it for a few days or a week, Versus drying for longer term, like a jerky type of meat.

Just found this on line:
Smoking can be used to preserve meats while infusing it with smoky flavor. There are two methods--hot and cold smoking. Cold smoking takes a longer time while hot smoking takes merely a few hours. All types of meat may be prepared by this technique including seafood and fish. The smoking process removes a large amount of the water that undesirable micro-organisms require to live and breed.

I guess it's all of the above? cooking, drying and preserving?
 
A meat/fish smoker could be as easily constructed as the one below.

royketelt.jpg


It is just a tripod covered with a tarp (like the one SkunkWerX drew).
The trick is to manage the fire. It should generate much smoke but very little heat.
I was smoking a moose heart when the pic was taken.

Tor
 
Preserving meat is one of the issues I've wondered about. If I took any sort of medium game, such as deer, I want to be able to save some of the meat for later but I have zero experience WRT dressing, preparing the meat, cooking it and preserving the rest... I'd hate for large portions to go to waste.
 
DOC-CANADA said:
Maybe I've been under a misconception for a long time. I always understood the reason smoking was used for preserving meat (in an outdoors environment) was to keep flies etc. from laying eggs on/in the meat while drying.

So, in other words, the smoking was not intended to preserve the meat, the drying was.

Am I wrong?

Doc
Click to expand...

The smoke adds sodium nitrate to the meat. It cures the meat and acts as a preservative.

BB
 
Ancient indians didn't know squat about sodium nitrates and such.

They DID know about flies and knew that smoke kept the flies off the meat while it dried.

.
 
David E said:
Ancient indians didn't know squat about sodium nitrates and such.

They DID know about flies and knew that smoke kept the flies off the meat while it dried.

.
Click to expand...

They probably didn't know squat about acetylsalicylic acid either, but I bet that didn't stop them from chewing willow bark, and not knowing why it worked probably didn't change its effectiveness!
 
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