Little Brown Egg I: Condo-Q

Barbecue is one of man's earliest and greatest inventions. The practice of cooking meat slowly over low heat and smoke produces food of incredible taste and texture, with a flavor that is completely irreproducible by any other method. I've often longed for the chance to produce my own slow roasted smoky goodness, but I'm sad to say that I live in a state that prohibits condo owners like me from operating a gas or charcoal smoker. Stupid fire codes!

I've been a student of all things Q for several months now. My inability to produce my own variety of homegrown goodness didn't stop me from spending hours reading the Rec.food.barbeque FAQ, various cook books and magazine articles. It seemed like I was torturing myself and that I'd never be able to live the dream, until one day my culinary hero Alton Brown showed me the way.

In an episode of Good Eats he detailed a method for constructing a condo-sized electric smoker from a hot plate, two large flower pots and a few charcoal grill components. At last, salvation! You see, since there is no open flames the smoker is legal for my domicile, and the small size makes it easy to store on our little back porch!

I immediately set about creating my own smoker. Behold...the Condo-Q!

Ok, so it's no Big Green Egg, but it only cost me about $70 to make. If you break it down, you can see the component parts and how it goes together.

The bottom pot is a 14" terra cotta pot from Wal-Mart. The hot plate inside was an all-metal 1500W unit I bought on E-bay. The Char-Broil grill thermometer and 13.5" smoker grate came from Home Depot. I got an el cheapo steel pie plate (holding the burnt hickory chips) from a local housewares place. The hardest part was finding the shallow pot for the top (I got it at Pike Nursery). The pie plate rests directly on the burner, with the grate going inside the bottom pot. I got really lucky in that the grate fits perfectly inside the pot, resting right on the inside lip where the taper starts!

What's that black box you ask? Well, that's where the weekend tinkering stops and the obsessed engineer starts. The first time I fired the smoker up for a test run the hot plate blew out. You see, the hot plate had a heat-sensitive fuse that blew when the unit overheated in the closed space. Since I was already taking the hot plate apart, I decided to go one step further and relocate the controls outside of the smoker. That way, I'd be able to turn the heat up or down without removing the lid and wasting valuable time! I will rule the world!!

I ordered an enclosure and some high-temperature wire from McMaster-Carr and got a new (replaceable) fuse holder from Radio Shack. I used high temp wire because I didn't want the insulation melting and blowing up the smoker. I mounted the control knob in the enclosure and wired the box up, being careful to replicate the wiring layout that was in the hot plate. I also used a terminal block so that I could fasten and remove the hot plate leads to assemble and disassemble the smoker for storage.

I affectionately call my creation the "Little Brown Egg". I built the egg several months ago, but had to put the project aside to concentrate on other things. If not for another blogger's post, it'd still be there...

How did it turn out? Check out my follow up post where I put the LBE to good use...