I think some of the confusion can come in because when some people say they are cold smoking, they effectively are really hot smoking.
I remember when I started doing jerky, I watched a lot of YouTube videos and noticed that for every "Cold smoking is dangerous!" video there seemed to be someone else with a "Cold smoking is fine!" one.
I then noticed, almost by accident, that the "cold smoking is fine" ones were using heat...often a significant amount. That's not cold smoking. When I do jerky on my pellet grill at 180 F, that's a relatively low temperature, but that is very much hot smoking: those little pieces of meat will get above 140 F quite quickly.
Furthermore, I'm not on Facebook as much as I used to be, but I went through a phase in which I joined every BBQ and smoking group I ran across. I still check in from time to time and wow, just wow.....let's just say that a great many of the posts betray a certain acute lack of understanding of basic pathogenic microbiology. (Yikes!)
I remember when I started doing jerky, I watched a lot of YouTube videos and noticed that for every "Cold smoking is dangerous!" video there seemed to be someone else with a "Cold smoking is fine!" one.
I then noticed, almost by accident, that the "cold smoking is fine" ones were using heat...often a significant amount. That's not cold smoking. When I do jerky on my pellet grill at 180 F, that's a relatively low temperature, but that is very much hot smoking: those little pieces of meat will get above 140 F quite quickly.
Furthermore, I'm not on Facebook as much as I used to be, but I went through a phase in which I joined every BBQ and smoking group I ran across. I still check in from time to time and wow, just wow.....let's just say that a great many of the posts betray a certain acute lack of understanding of basic pathogenic microbiology. (Yikes!)
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