Very slow food.

Madison.

Been thinking a lot on slow cooking lately. As in, the sort of cooking that takes hours upon hours, if not days, to do. The key difficulties with this, currently, are:

• A lack of fancy, high-priced equipment. Those big smoker-grills, with the sidecar fireboxes? A few hundred bucks, and even the smallest ones weigh 200 lbs. and up. Not the sort of thing I've really got storage space for. Even pricier are the chemistry-lab-type water baths for sous vide cooking, at roughly fifteen-hundred a pop. (Plus the hundred-dollar vacuum-sealer to go along with.) Since the oven won't hang out below 200°F, and a stovetop water bath can't manage a bare 135°F, I'll need to be more creative.
  
• Storage space. It's not something I've got just lying around, so to speak. The charcoal grill already takes up most of the space in the coat closet. Homebrewing, canning and gardening equipment (plus the bicycles) have taken up all of the available space in the basement. Any new equipment has to be small.
  
• Time, of course. In addition to having a job that actually requires me to show up and do stuff, five days a week, some of that has to happen in Chicago. Really throws a monkey wrench into some things, and makes planning a lot more critical.

Still, that's not going to stop me. Not if I can do anything about it. I think the solution, or at least the key part of it, is an electric hotplate. Being a little more low-powered than the stovetop burners, it ought to be able to maintain a very low-temperature simmer. I think. At any rate, since they rarely cost more than twenty dollars, I won't feel too bad if it's not what I'm expecting.

The real benefit of the hotplate, though, is that I ought to be able to use it for outdoor smoking, a la Alton Brown. I could probably use the charcoal grill, combined with a Saturday's worth of vigilant coal-watching, but I haven't yet mastered charcoal. And with the charcoal grill limitations here in Madison - gotta keep it 10 feet from the building, which means it's off the patio and onto the grass - keeping a constant supply of hot coals can be a pain. A hotplate, though, should provide the reliable, constant heat to smolder hardwood sawdust for as long as necessary.

Of course, even a hotplate may produce too much heat for effective cold-smoking. Maybe even hot-smoking, though that'll need to be tested. I'm thinking I need to build a series of smoking chambers to create a more effective system, as in:

• The smoke-producing chamber. Probably a cardboard box, with the hotplate, a pie pan full of sawdust, and a fan-powered exit tube. Plus a small door for replacing sawdust from time to time. This should, at least, eliminate any problems with radiant heat. The key difficulty here is finding an appropriate fan; my initial guess is that a computer fan ought to be the right size for the job.
  One side benefit: since the heat source is electric, I can build this setup on the concrete patio. No concerns about fire too close to the apartment building.
  
• The cooling chamber. I'm still a bit fuzzy on this one, since I don't know what sort of temperatures I'm dealing with. The simplest version is to make the smoke tubing long enough that it'll cool the smoke through extended contact with the air, like a really low-tech heat exchanger. I could beef it up by running it through another chamber (read: cardboard box) with a tray loaded with ice at the bottom, to get a little more cooling power. Or, to take it a step further, run the whole shebang through a cooler filled with cold water. That sounds like it's reaching into difficult territory, though, requiring more money and storage space that I haven't got.
  
• The food-smoking chamber. Another box, with a pair of wooden dowels to support a cooling rack right in the middle. The tubing enters from one side to fill it with smoke, presumably at the temperature I'm looking for. A tray of ice, if necessary, to cool things down a little more. Just leave the food in here for as long as necessary, and then it's off to the next step in the process.

That seems to make the most sense to me, though I've yet to work out all of the details. Like, how do I get power out there? I'm hoping to be able to rig up a medium-base socket to a three-prong outlet so I can plug into the porch's light fixture, rather than running an extension cord out the door. (If that's what I need to do, then I'll have to rig up a bug screen to seal up the door.) And how do I determine the best way to build the cooling chamber(s)? Without too many iterations, at least. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of, as well.

In the end, I'm confident that the results of this'll be entirely worth the effort.