British BBQ Society Forums

The title probably gives it away, but I am from South Wales - Port Talbot to be precise.

I am a newbie smoker with a home built smoker made from a galvanised steel dustbin and, so far, it has worked like a charm.

The online 'build a trash can smoker' guides all mentioned an electric hot plate, but that burned out on the first go! Smoking ribs and the damned thing could not get the temp up to anything over 75C and died trying. Used coals and wood chips since and no such issues.

I have done pulled pork and a small brisket, but both were obvious 'first attempts' - the pork took forever and didn't get up to internal temp of 70C, so I finished in a low oven in a roaster. The brisket, I tried using the minion method for and found the temp of 300F-350F to be too much as it melted the fat inside, but burned the bark.

Both were still delicious though. I guess smoking is like beer, pizza and sex - even when it's not perfect, it's still pretty damned good.

Be careful of the galvo it gives off fumes that can be poisonous. I've only done 1 brisket but as I understand it the whole point is to slowly melt the fat inside and get a crunchy bark outside. Burnt bits are nice. Unless it was coal?:D

Alright, what's occurin'?

essexsmoker wrote:Be careful of the galvo it gives off fumes that can be poisonous. I've only done 1 brisket but as I understand it the whole point is to slowly melt the fat inside and get a crunchy bark outside. Burnt bits are nice. Unless it was coal?:D

Really? What can I do to prevent it being poisonous?

Your best bet would be to get a non-galvanised container to use - a lot of us use 55 gallon barrels for the same purpose (If you search on here for UDS you'll see a few threads). I think it's possible to un-galvanise what you've got by either heating it up sufficiently to burn the zinc off or soaking in some kind of acid for the same purpose, but that sounds like quite a lot of effort.

It's a bit of a controversial issue - some people will argue that it's fine, a smoker won't get hot enough to cause a problem but I'd rather be safe than sorry when it comes to heavy metal poisoning!