Review - Cold Smoking Course

Another weekend, another course. Recently I've spent quite a lot of time at various cookery courses, well spent time in my view. There's even some more courses lined up for later in the year.

This weekend it was time for the Food Smoking Course arranged by Turan of Coldsmoking.co.uk fame, a course I was given as a Christmas present.


The course was held in Stoke Hammond so me and my friend Howie set of in the morning to make it up there in time. During the journey we could tell that we most likely were in for a cold and wet day. We've both had worse days than that so that didn't really bother us.

Well there we were more than a bit early so we spent some time walking around Stoke Hammond waiting for the course to start. What we gathered from that walk is that they don't like the the planned wind turbines, there's really not that much to Stoke Hammond and the local neighbourhood watch is slow to react to dodgy looking strangers loitering around the village.

After our refreshing, read fricking cold, walk it was time for the course to start. As we entered the nursery that was hosting the event we were greeted by Turan and his lovely wife.

There was a bit of a wait for everyone to turn up so in the meantime our preferred choice for lunch (a choice of two different soups) was taken and we were sorted with some coffee.

Turan demonstrating the smoker unit, with the cardboard smoker next to him.

Once everyone was there we were given a brief talk about the layout of the day and roughly what we were going to be smoking and learning.

I will not give everything away, there's got to be some surprises and secrets for this course, but we did get to smoke and taste quite a lot of different foods. Look at the photos and you should probably be able to deduct most of what me smoked anyways.

Turan talked us through some of the theory behind both cold and hot smoking as well as highlighting potential health risks associated with the different stages of the smoking process.

The cardboard smoker loaded with some food to smoke.

For the cold smoking we used a smoker made from Turan's own plans as well as the surprise of the day - a cardboard box. I was pleasantly surprised by how well you could smoke food in a cardboard box. It did however take a beating from the rain, but nothing that some time drying out and some gaffa tape probably can't sort out.

Due to the weather we did the hot smoking indoors, using a stove top hot smoker. Among other things Turan showed us how you can get a very good result in just 15 minutes with one of those and some good quality trout.

Sometimes it looks like the line between cremation and cold smoking is very thin.

To sum it up we had a very enjoyable day, even taking the weather into account, and I am fairly sure that most, if not all, left with some good new knowledge as well as some extra tips and tricks. I would recommend this course to anyone who is interested in smoking and want to get a good taster of what's involved and how you can get started.

A presentation platter of some of the food we smoked.

I would like to extend a big thank you to Turans lovely wife who not only served us some excellent soup for lunch, she also made more cups of coffee and tea than any human being should ever be asked to during a day. By doing this she kept everyone's mood up in a very good way.

Finally, I'd just want to leave you with the following little bit. It shows what you can hear when you get quite a ragtag collection of people together for a course like this. My favourite quote of the day, from another delegate and totally unrelated to smoking, was the following one: "We had more chickens shagged to death by our turkey than what we lost to the foxes". This quote really have nothing to do with the review either but I just loved it so much that I thought I'd make it live for ever here on t'Interweb... ;)

[Disclaimer: To book this course was my suggestion, and full price was paid for it.]

P.S
I'm sorry about the quality of the photos but I didn't bring a proper camera, just my phone