Anyone build their own smoke house??

[chicks4kids]

I just processed the remaining 4 turkeys for the season and decided to take them down to my local butcher who happens to smoke meat once a week. Into the hickory smoker they went yesterday and this morning when I picked them up, my truck filled with the wonderful aroma of smoked turkey!! Oh my goodness! I wasn't hungry when I left the house to go get those darn things but by the time I got home with those 4 birds, I could barely stand it! I wanted to break into one immediately!

(I have to wait til tomorrow for my uncle's 50th birthday)! So I put them out in the garage to let them rest (cuz he had just pulled them out of the smoker) and my poor dog, a beagle, sat at the garage door with his nose to the jam just hoping for a whif of the aroma coming from within...poor thing

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone here has built their own smokehouse? And if so, do you have any recommendations or tips, ideas, etc. to pass on? Is it best just to buy one?

I still have 52 meaties to process ( in 3 weeks ) and family has already said that they'd love to have some of those smoked as well...and to tell the truth the way that those turkeys smelled today, I may just smoke all those meaties

However, although the price was good for the turkeys, the price is the same for chickens, I think, and that's a little too steep for a chicken. So I've just been looking into the whole smokehouse idea and thought I'd ask here.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer

BTW, not sure if this is in the right place....mods, feel free to move it if need be

 

[caspernc]

Mmmmmmmmmm, sounds like a google search. Were the turkeys smoked with apple wood or hickery?

 

[chicks4kids]

Hickory...........

 

[BettyR]

We built our smoke house out of an old fish cleaning house that wasn't being used and was sitting around falling apart. But we like to cold smoke our meats....that is we don't cook the meat as it is being smoked. We prefer to put some heavy smoke on it and then wrap and freeze the raw meat.

If you are looking to hot smoke then the smoker that we are using in the picture to get our smoke out of is what you would need. I bought ours at Walmart about this time of year... it was on Clearance for $99.00. I use it a lot for smoking chickens, ribs, roasts, pork and so on. It's a propane smoker...it has a little box in the bottom of the smoker that you load with wood chips that you can also get at Walmart. They have different flavors of woods and you can get chips or chunks. But I don't think I would try smoking the chickens all at the same time. I would just freeze them then as you get one out to cook thaw it out and smoke it for that meal. Of course if you are sure that you want all 52 of your chickens smoked then it may be cheaper to just get the butcher to smoke them.

 

[chicks4kids]

Yeah, I'm not too sure what I want right now. We like to have big family get togethers quite often and I'd like something that could accomodate a large 25+ lb. turkey or several chickens.


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[Oregon Blues]

I don't have the smoke house yet, but I've got a large upright freezer that conked out on me. It's waiting for someone to have the time to convert it into a cold smoker.

It'll be similar to BettyR's with the fire in a different container and then the smoke piped into the smoker where the meat is.

For smoke, we use the prunings off of our own apple and pear trees.