Has anyone tried making chipotles on the PBC? I've been wanting to give them a try but everything I've read says that you want to smoke them under 200 for 8-16 hours and that you need a very clean smoker, otherwise you'll get an off flavor. I see two problems with this in the PBC...
1. I'm not sure how it would be to try to maintain ~150 in the PBC
2. A loved PBC is anything but "clean", at least to the standards the it appears chipotles need.
I think "cold" smoke is the way to go. I used my cheapo Brinkmann R2D2, bought a small electric hotplate for heat, put a cast iron skillet filled with wood chips onto that and didn't use the water pan. Temps ranged roughly around ambient plus, which was less than 100°F in the smoker. it took a day or two as I recall. I used ripe (red) jalapenos that I grew myself.
Perhaps taking the lid off the PBC and using very few coals?
I think you may be able to get it to work. Just leave them on long enough to pick up some smoke then transfer to a low oven or dehydrator to fully dry them out. I do this a lot with my SnS kettle. Even for salsa and stuff like that. It doesn't take long to coat peppers with smoke. You could make it work with a chunk of lit wood and a pot with a lid on it; then dehydrate. There's only so much smoke something can take. It's more important the smoke be light in color that hits it, blue best, white kinda, black gross.
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I'd steer clear of trying to use the PBC for smoking chipotles ... unless you do what Willy suggested: get a hotplate and small wood chip container as the smoky heat source in lieu of the PBC's charcoal basket.
Chipotles are ripe (red) jalapeno chilies - you can do this with both red and green jalapenos, and the taste is similar.
Stem and seed the jalapenos, and cut in half. Get an A-Maze-N pellet smoker (available on Amazon and elsewhere) and your favorite flavor of pellets. Take the charcoal basket out of your PBC, and put the grill in. Put the jalapenos on the grill and cold smoke them until they are sufficiently smoky for your taste buds. Then dry them in a dehydrator or oven, until they snap or crunch easily. Then either crush them or powder them for adding to food. Keep them in an air-tight jar.
I also do this with Hatch chilies from New Mexico. Delicious!
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