The subtitle of this post should be something like:
When things go wrong they keep going wrong.....
I ordered a 3 kg slab of pork loin and when I got home and put it on the scale it was only 2.1 kg. I should have realised at that time that more was going to come....
I put the slab in brine (with cure #1) and injected 10% of the brine in the loin. Let it sit for 4-5 days and took it out of the brine and hung for an hour or 2 to dry a bit.
So far: not too many issues.
Filled the cold smoke generator with saw dust and added a hot plate to the smoker as I wanted to smoke it at around 40-45 oC and the fr!"£$king sawdust didn't want to light, even though it was the same dust as I used a couple days before and I dried it out in the oven. I tried numerous times to light it and it smoked for about 5 minutes before going out again.
Eventually I put the csg directly on the hot plate and got plenty smoke, but only for an hour or so. Normally the same load of saw dust gives me 10 hours!
Finished the loin of by poaching as my oven doesn't want to stay below 100 oC (let alone 93 oC).
I let the temperature of the water come up really slow and it never got above 77 oC.
The little piece I tore of the loin before poaching had quite a good smoky taste, but after poaching I could only just detect a hint of smoke.
The end result wan't bad, but a little bit boring.
I have been re-thinking my smoking strategies as the csg worked proper when I had the proQ smoke dust and with the first batch I could buy here. After that, nothing worked, so I was thinking of just warm to hot smoking.
And then I suddenly found the smoking dust again, so hopefully my next attempt goes a heck of a lot better!