Firing up the smoke house today

Time to brush the snow off the smoke house.  It is smoking meat season as we prepare for the long cold winter coming up!  

We were gifted some moose meat this season, so we decided to make some moose jerky.  We cut the meat into strips and soaked it in a brine for about 4 days at +3C.  Since it is freezing cold outside, the meat just sat in a cooler outside and it did just fine!

Then I went out to find some wood.  I have smoked with birch in the past, but my indigenous friends from Kehewin taught me about red willow.  I've been using it ever since for smoking meat.  It has a beautiful smelling, sweet smoke which tastes amazing!  Obviously this is for people who live in the northern boreal forest.  There are other woods that are great for smoking too, but we live off the land, so we use what we have.  

Red willow grows in swampy areas and can get really broken up and thick.  I'm looking for the stuff that is still green, so I selected that front one for smoking the meat today.  I can tell it is red willow by the dark red color of the wood.

To burn green wood requires that I setup a good bed of coals.  So I start the fire with lots of dry wood and I burn the fire for a while to get it all started.  While the fire is burning, I prepare the smoke house trays at the same time.  

A good hot fire will melt any snow that is around and clear up the smoke so that I can get the meat mounted on the trays.  I mount the meat before I put the green wood on the fire, otherwise I won't be able to see anything.  Experience taught me that lesson!  lol

Now that the meat is mounted, I close it up and throw on my green - red willow wood and let the smoking begin!

The recipe for the brine that we marinated the meat in:

2 cups of sugar
2 cups of salt
1 cup of molasses

This recipe will marinate about 5-6 lbs of meat.  We tripled the recipe for this batch.  Now I will check in on it every half hour or so to make sure all is okay.  Some of the strips are fairly thick, so I'm estimating about a 8-10 hour smoke in order to make jerky.  Because of the way I setup our smoke house, the smoke is cooler, so it will take longer and there is less risk of burning the meat.  I'll post pictures when I am done.