Ever since tasting my friend rycamor’s smoked home-raised chicken… I’ve been wanting a smoker.

I’ve looked at buying them and considered building my own smokehouse; however, I really haven’t had the time or money to do either.

So when I wanted to make my own smoked hot sauce from my homegrown peppers, something had to be done.

I had to improvise – and the solution I came up with works remarkably well, despite its humble pedigree and less-than-stellar appearance.

Here’s how you make your own rocket stove smoker for the top of a rocket stove.

An Easy DIY Smoker

Items needed:

1 rocket stove

1 large stockpot

1 stainless steamer basket

2 pieces of wire

2 pieces of aluminum foil

Soaked wood chips

Take your stockpot and wire in a shallow steamer basket. A trip to your local thrift store should turn one up. Pour some soaked wood chips in the bottom, then put your food in the basket. Cover the top with aluminum foil to keep most of the air out of the stockpot. If you leave the top open, the wood chips in the bottom may ignite and burn your food, plus the smoke escapes.

Fire up your rocket stove (I use my beloved StoveTec for this and many other projects) and place the smoker on top.

Peppers and a few green tomatoes ready to smoke

I find it takes roughly the same amount of time to smoke a basket of food in this smoker as it does to smoke one Dominican Churchill cigar: about an hour.

The capacity of my steamer basket is a quart or two. That’s not much if you were smoking pork, but it’s plenty for smoking hot peppers. I can make a half-gallon of smoked hot sauce with one run of this rocket stove smoker.

To see it in action, check out the video I made yesterday:

BTW, the stockpot I’m using here is the one that got replaced when I finally broke down and bought the really good one I reviewed in this post. It used to burn food… now it’s burning wood chips – which is something I actually WANT it to do.

Soon I’ll probably build myself a big smokehouse. For now, however, I’m getting my fix thanks to my StoveTec rocket stove and a simple DIY smoker made from thrift store components.