I want to talk about this product, because it's great. I bought it on a lark, not really knowing how well it would work. Reviews all over the internet are mixed. But it arrived and I love it. You can get one here.

Basically, it's a pipe with a fan inside. The process will be familiar to those of you with even a passing familiarity with marijuana smoking. You fill the bowl with sawdust, or tea leaves, or even marijuana, then turn on the fan and light whatever's in the bowl. The fan sucks the smoke down and out the tube on the front of it. It also comes with a rubber hose that attaches to the tube for easier maneuverability of your smoke. One of the main complaints about it is that it is so simple. It really is just a pipe with a fan. But that's not a bad thing! It's simple, but it works so well.

There is nothing that tough about smoking things. Anything + fire = smoke. Create that smoke in the presence of food, and you've got smoked food. So I'm not saying that this device is necessary. I smoked things a few times before I got this device. What this smoking gun does is it makes the process convenient. I take it off the shelf and, within a minute, I am smoking the food. When I'm done, there's no clean-up. It removes a lot of the barriers to smoking food.

So far I've used it for a number of things, including smoking some homemade maple-cured bacon with hickory smoke. It is delicious and smoky bacon. I put the cured and unsmoked bacon in a large tupperware container (after rinsing it and drying it off), raised it up on some wadded up foil, then filled the tupperware with really dense hickory smoke and sealed it. Then I put it in the fridge for the smoke to penetrate. That took about two minutes. After a couple hours I repeated the process. The next day, I had delicious, smoky bacon.

Polyscience also sells "sawdust" for the smoking gun. First of all, you can buy sawdust for smoking anywhere, so there's really no reason to pay a premium for theirs. Second, it isn't sawdust, it's just more finely ground wood chips. Anyway, I got a sampler pack for $20 for convenience, but now I have a couple bags of hickory chips that I plan on grinding occasionally to use for smoking.

One thing, though. I can't yet comment on its longevity. I can see how the screen inside that makes sure sawdust particles don't get sucked through could get clogged up with tar or sap or whatever after repeated use. At some point, I'll have to replace the screen. The good news is that screen replacement appears easy to do.

Posted by Barzelay on 2009/02/02 @ 23:32 | Comments (5) | Equipment

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