The title of this post is a tribute to anyone (but especially Justin and Emily) who knows the game “Pass the Pigs”

First, take some wood-chips. For us, this means putting a lump of last-year’s olive wood through the chipper. Interestingly, it seems that the larger chips burn better than the smaller bits – perhaps due to getting more air in the tin.

Next, apply heat to get smoke. Plan A, which we have used successfully for a while now, is to put a soldering iron in the bottom of a tin, and then put the chips on top. While the soldering iron works, this is great, but unfortunately it is pretty hard on cheap nasty soldering irons. (It has to be an unused soldering iron, unless you want to poison the bacon with tin solder…)

You need somewhere to put the smoke, so we set ours up in the clay oven (we normally use a defunct gas barbeque, but we had 10 kilos of belly pork to smoke, which just would not fit, so….

After about half an hour of smoking, the soldering iron died (brand new as well!), so we had to make an emergency plan B. Also, the clay oven was not a good site, as the smoke was only circulating on top. Given that it was hot (35 degrees during the day), we wanted to get the bacon smoked ASAP, so mucking about with a failed smoking device in a failed smoke box was not an option. Here is plan B:

One rusty 50 gallon drum with the wreckage of an old door on top to keep the smoke in. The tin with woodchips, now without soldering iron, is at the bottom of the drum. Two bricks and a grid (from the dead barbeque) keep any bacon from falling on to the bottom of the drum (lucky I thought about that, as one of the bits of bacon did fall off, and this drum is in no way food grade equipment!

And here it is, smoking away. The chips kept going out, and so every hour or so I had to check and then relight the chips with a blow-torch. I think it will work, if the tin has more holes in it to let more air circulate. Need to experiment more. The actual smoking part worked extremely well, and we now have 10 kg of smoked streaky bacon, sliced and packed in the freezer in handy 200 gram packs. Breakfast just got better…..mmmmmmmm