Topical Salve

In season 7 of Good Eats, Alton Brown builds a do-it-yourself clay pot smoker for $47.32. Skip ahead seven years to January of 2011.  Over the course of a few weekends, I hunted down parts and built my own.

Things were surprisingly difficult to find. Neither the Home Depot nor Lowe’s had clay pots of sufficient size that would work as a base and a lid. I ended up at an actual nursery for those. The grill grate was purchased at a Barbecues Galore. Again, the home improvement centers were a bust.

The hardest part to find, by far, was the hot plate. Nobody local sells them anymore, I ended up purchasing one off Amazon (this one, to be precise).

Parts is parts

The square hot plate did not fit on the bottom of my clay pot, so I ended up disassembling it. A lot of people on the Internet did the same when building their own smokers. The heating coil is easily removed from the hot plate once you open it up. Except for the wires, a metal bracket is all that’s holding it in there. Some pliers made quick work of the bracket, and the wires joined to the heating element with 0.25-inch disconnects, so they pulled right off. The disconnects on the heating element are press-fit, so while I was at it, I spun them around 180 degrees so they would face the hole on the bottom of the pot.

Some stranded patch wire (I used 14-gauge because that’s what was available — again, not at the local home improvement stores. The hot plate used 18-gauge, thermally insulated), a couple wire nuts, and some more 0.25-inch disconnects, and I was ready to go.

Alive! It's alive!

When splicing in my extension wires, I kept the hot plate’s temperature control in the circuit. The temperature control works by changing the spacing between two thin metal leaves. Turn the knob towards high, and the spacing increases. Turn the knob towards low, and the spacing decreases. These controllers work because one of the leaves bends when it gets hot. The hotter it gets, the more it bends, until contact is made between the two leaves, interrupting power to the heating coil. When things cool down, the leaf straightens, and power once again flows to the heating coil.

Placing the base of the hot plate away from the heating element as I did should obviate the temperature control — it simply should not work. However, the knob does have an off position, which forces the contact closed, turning off the heating element, making interrupting the electricity to the heating element a bit more convenient than reaching for the power cord and unplugging the thing. Plus there’s the phantom sense of control the knob gives — akin to the door close button in an elevator, which doesn’t actually do anything. Temperature too high or low? Turn the knob. If nothing else, you’ll feel better.

I should say the temperature control shouldn’t do anything. Playing with it, however, showed perceptible adjustments in the temperature range inside the smoker. Cranked to high, the smoker cycled between 250F and 280F. Turned down to low, and the smoker cycled between 220F and 250F. As they say in inconclusive scientific papers, more study is warranted.

The completed smoker

The chips are down

To test the smoker’s ability to generate smoke, I placed a pan of soaked apple wood chips on the heating element, and turned it on. Sure enough, once the temperature hit around 230F, appreciable amounts of smoke were generated. The smoke lasted for around 90 minutes, after which all that was left in the pan were ashes and embers.

The test chicken that bathed in the smoke tasted pretty good, too.

Smokin'!

The remains of the day

What’s Next: Figure out why the hot plate temperature control appears to work.

Also, the smoker needs reliable temperature control. Even if the hot plate control works away from the heating element, the observed 30F swing seems a bit much (should I dare test my kitchen oven?).* A thermocouple, PID controller, and power relay would do the trick, but would add significant cost to the project. As it stands, the clay pot smoker cost around $80 (not including purchase of tools I needed to move the heating element and gas used driving around looking for parts). Quite a bit more than Alton Brown’s quoted price of $47.32, even adjusting for inflation.

* If I were to do this project again, I would forgo purchase of a grill thermometer. My remote digital probe thermometer worked just as well, if not better, and with it I was able to keep my head out of the smoke while checking temperature.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Cookery, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.