Home made smoker

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(03-01-2021, 03:30 PM)fredtoast Wrote: I know I posted about this before, but I have been reading a lot in the other smoker thread and this is a good story.

Years ago I bought some goats to clean up a piece of property.  When they were done I decided to make sausage out of one of them.  My father and I killed and skinned it.  I let it hang in my garage for a few days.  When you make sausge from lean meat instead of pork you have to add extra fat.  I went to Swaggerty's plant in Sevierville to buy fat and casings.  The pure fat cost me $1.99 a pound while a pork shoulder roast would have cost $1.69.

I borrowed a commercial grinder from my cousin.  That thing must have weighed 75 pounds.  I almost killed myself getting it into the kitchen.

On Valentines day my fiance and I ate psychedelic mushrooms drank a bunch of wine and made the sausage.  It was a crazy experience.  I had never used the a sausage grinder before so we wasted a bunch of the casings.  But eventually we had a sting of links.  They just were not very uniform in size.  Of course we did not clean anything before going to bed and the next morning we awoke to a kitchen where every square inch of surface seemed to be covered with grease and fat.  Not a pleasant experience with a hangover.

But the real crazy part was my homemade smoker.  I read online how to make a smoker from and old freezer.  I bought one for a few bucks from a salvage yard and cleaned it out well.  Drilled a small hole in the side and inserted a meat thermometer.  Then I cut a hole in the roof and laid a board over it to open or close it.  Hung up the strings of sausages inside and placed a pan of charcoal and water-soaked hickory chips in the bottom.  It was  a lot of trouble to keep the temperature in the correct range, but at the end of the day I was pleased with the results.  I dried them pretty hard like a summer sausage.

But when I was through I noticed that the plastic liner of the freezer had melted all out of shape.  So I assume the sausage probably had some amount of chemicals from the melted plastic.  They tasted very good and I ate them all.  I figured one batch would not have enough poison to hurt me too bad.  But I would never do it on a regular basis.  

So my homemade smoker worked, but it was a "one use" deal.

You should be ashamed. Poor goat worked for you and that's how you "reward" him?