After 76 degrees last Sunday, it was only about 26 degrees today, so I thought I would take advantage of the cooler day to smoke some more cheese as my current supply is running low.
I had a block of Tillamook Medium Cheddar, Cabot Classic Vermont Seriously Sharp Cheddar, Gouda, and some String Cheese.
I fired up the ANMPS with one row of Apple wood pellets and smoked the block cheeses for 3 hours, rested for an hour, and then vacuum-packed.
The water bottles really did the trick. I had tested the ANMPS with the pellets before with similar ambient temps without the bottles and the temps rose and stayed in the 120-130 range. It was 26-30 degrees ambient temp, but my smoker was on the sunny side of the deck and the sun had heated it up pretty good. So the smoker temp when I added the cheese was 54 degrees. Surprisingly the smoker temp stayed around 55 degrees for most of the smoke. It briefly rose to as high as 57, but a range of 54-57 is pretty dang tight. You would think I had an Auber hooked up.
There was plenty of pellets left after 3 hours of smoking when I took the block cheese out and replaced with the string cheese. My Intention was to run the string cheese for 2 hours. But about an hour into the smoke the ANMPS went out, so I had to relight. Because of this, I added 30 minutes to the smoke.
I got some nice color on the cheese, but you can see from some of the pictures that the tops got more color than the bottoms. I think I may have had the water bottles a little too close to the bottom of the cheese and they got sheltered from some of the smoke. So, next time, I am going to lower the bottles a bit.
All in all, I think it was a pretty successful smoke. Now to mellow in the fridge for a couple of weeks. If the weather stays cool, I may have to do one more smoke yet to last through the hot summer months.