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Hello to all of our loyal and new listeners of “Our Cozy Kitchen”.
This Sunday, September 23, 2012 at 4 PM, Pacific time, 7 PM Eastern time, and all the other times listed at the end of this message, Ruth Ann Acosta and I are going to treat you to a different and most interesting and exciting program in our series of “Our Cozy Kitchen”.
This Sunday we will have as our special guest a gentleman from the Bradley Smokers Company who will talk about their accessible smokers, answer questions regarding the difference between smoking/barbecuing/grilling, and who will share some of his favorite smoker recipes. What a way to end the summer of 2012, but many of us will still have time to utilize smokers this year and in the future.
As Mark Miller wrote to me:
Mark Miller:
Smoking/grilling food for over 25 years, married, avid outdoorsman, family man with 4 kids. Loves to have fun!
The Bradley Smoker Story
Bradley Smoker really got started when Ted Bradley did a deal with a master food smoker back in the seventies. The story goes that this master smoker knew nothing about catching salmon and asked Ted for some advice. Ted Bradley said if he wanted to learn how to catch fish, he was going to have to teach Ted how to smoke salmon. It was a hell of a lot easier to catch salmon back then. If this agreement happened today, I doubt Bradley Smoker would have gotten very far.
Anyways this master smoker learned how to catch salmon. Ted basically told him the cardinal rule of fishing…do not fish where there are no fish, period.
So the guy kept his promise, gave my Ted some smoker recipes, keeping it simple with very common ingredients and told Ted the secret to food smoking. He said you must control the smoke, plain and simple. Back then that meant constantly attending to the sawdust, never letting the heat being generated by the burning sawdust get too high, and most important, never letting the wood burn down to a ash. Watch the wood being burned, when it starts to have glowing ambers, and there is flecks of white ash appearing, get rid of it. Replace it immediately with new sawdust and continue smoking as the recipe requires. That’s it, simple huh? I just gave it away….
Not quite yet I am afraid, there is a lot to food smoking that I am still learning about every day. And I am reminded by all the food smokers out there that we still have many things to uncover, never been tried before. Soon to be the latest and greatest recipe you have got to try. We will try to keep you posted.
Want to know more about us, keep reading. I promise not to leave anything out.
With this simple principle about food smoking firmly entrenched in my Ted’s masters list of principals and rules. He set out to make a food smoker that did just what this guy said had to be done. (control the smoke). Back then they used a bread riser for the smoke house, old cast iron frying pan to hold the sawdust, and a hot plate to generate the smoke. Great, the other most important requirement was a good deal of free time to do nothing but watch smoke, this is like watching paint dry. This brings me to my uncle who happens to be a professional in both endeavors. He also happens to be a pretty good inventor.
They set out to make a smoker that produces clean continuous smoke without the need for constant attention. They tried everything to control the burning of sawdust, even studied how different types of sawdust burn differently. Scratched the concept of soaking sawdust in water before hand. That just made steam until the sawdust was dry enough to start smoking, yuk. Larger chunks of wood required more heat energy to start burning, this did not work because they could never control the heat, and inevitably the wood was burning down to ashes, eliminating any attempt at making the food taste good.
You would not believe the gismos and gadget they created that accomplished exactly nothing until they finally went back to the beginning and decided on the best sawdust for making smoke was cube cut, not too fine, and not from a planining saw. But how do you control sawdust? Good luck with that one. The Bradley Smoking Bisquette was developed first. The size shape and density is critical, and it worked. It created the smoke cleanly, did not burn down to a ash, needed very little heat energy to smoke. And most important, could be easily extinguished. You could say that they invented the first food smoker that stops the smoking process. That would be half true.
This is kind of like the old record players. What came first the record, or the player? They now needed to develop the smoke house. Again they had to go back to the rules and principals of food smoking. The smoke house did not change very much, however the hot plate was replaced with a very low heating element, the frying pan was replaced with a elaborate feed system to continuously feed the bisquettes to the heat element so it made smoke continuously. Instead of stopping the process to remove the spent sawdust they included a water bath to extinguish the bisquettes, and a secondary heating element to control the temperature of the smokehouse, a few other required pieces to making it as good they could make it and what we have is a Bradley Smoker.
It worked great, made fantastic smoke, and the food that came out was nothing short of outstanding. Local gourmet chefs were the first to get their hands on the Bradley Smoker.
If you have any questions prior to this Sunday’s “Our Cozy Kitchen”, please feel free to e-mail me at
kenmetz1946@gmail.com, or Ruth Ann Acosta at
ruth1244@gmail.com