Building Your Own Smoker

Where we live, the wind blows pretty much non-stop, and we just try to keep fetching things off the fences and returning them to the neighbors. One thing that didn't survive well was the electric smoker. Or the second one. Or the third one.

My husband became very frustrated (read irate and cussing here for frustrated). He wanted to throw the rest of the pieces into the dumpster, but being a packrat...I mean "thrifty", I said, "Baby--don't do it!"

So one day when he was feeling both moderate insanity and also the urge to smoke a chicken (please, no rude jokes here!), he decided to take the electric pan, burner and stainless steel shelf that were left and build himself a windproof smoker!

HE took cinder blocks, ya know the concrete kind, and built a little rectangular hut out of them, then put the pan and burner in the bottom. He even found an extra shelf out of an old fridge and added more space. A piece of siding that was lying around became the lid, with another block on top to keep the kids and cats out.

Very cool, we had smoked rosemary chicken for dinner and soup the next day. I even got to throw on a little bit of goat cheese, which we found out is completely awesome when smoked.

So, if you have an old smoker whose main body parts have been trashed for one reason or another, Fear not! Just build your own. I'm thinking that if we get a wind big enough to take out this one, then we won't be around to care!

Source: General depravity of entire family. Ok, we're also cheap, I mean thrifty!

By Gina J. from Colorado

My husband has a gas grill that had a burner on the side that he had never used once. He had a charcol smoker that he wanted to use more in the cooler parts of the year, but it was hard to keep up the heat. So he looked into a gas smoker, $400! Instead he bought a $20 hose and adapted his two items into one by cutting a hole in the bottom of the smoker and putting the burner in and connecting the hose to grill. Money saved $380!

By Linda from Rapid City, SD