Meats and Sausages
Smokehouse Plans
Smokehouse plans presented on our site are free and will make functional smokehouses. Before one starts buying or building a smokehouse, it is recommended to read the primer on smoking meat in order to get some basics about meat smoking and smokehouses.
Almost any smokehouse will do for home production. If you see smoke sipping through your cardboard box, you are smoking meat, that simple. It does not have to be perfectly tight if the cooking process will be performed somewhere else.
United States Department of Agriculture Smokehouse Plans
The smokehouse plans (5352-Masonry, 5351-Frame, 5695-Frame, 5695-Masonry) compiled in this section pertain to the traditional gravity type of smokehouse technology. Although they will not be used by commercial facilities anymore, they can still be of practical use on the farm, or an avid hunter, someone living off the grid, or anyone smoking a lot of meat. They were not designed for smoking meat only, but to be a storage facility as well.
The Smokehouse Plans: 5352, 5351, 5695 (Frame) and 5695 (Masonry) courtesy North Dakota State University.
Meat Smokers
A smokehouse is a large facility that smokes products. It can be a combination of a smoking chamber that acts as a storage facility at the same time or a large commercial unit that smokes thousands of pounds of meat a day. Such units are built of stainless steel; they have inlet and exhaust fans and computerized controls for maintaining temperature, humidity, and the duration of the smoking. Often, they are combined in series together
A meat smoker is a much smaller dedicated unit for smoking meats and sausages. Any enclosure that covers smoldering fire, for example, a kettle barbecue unit, can be called a smoker as long as it is able to generate some smoke. And that is easy, as all that is required is to partially eliminate the supply of fresh air to burning wood chips. There are dozens of small units made of metal that are sold by Home Depot©, Lowes©, and online.
The above information is reprinted with permission from the book Meat Smoking and Smokehouse Design.
Note See Smoke Houses in the main menu at the top of the page to learn more about building smokers, smoke generation, fireboxes, controls, traditional smokers, and more...
