Smoking Priced in Fuel, Salt, and Loss: A Small Smokehouse Accounted in One Ledger

Smoking is usually described by flavour and appearance, while its costs are kept in separate places: wood in one pile, salt in another, weight lost along the way, and hours that nobody adds up. This paper puts one stated batch through one ledger. A batch of 20.0 kg of fresh fish is processed in a chamber 1.2 m by 1.2 m by 2.0 m, either by hot smoking at 70 °C or by cold smoking at 25 °C followed by drying. Hot smoking takes 8.0 hours in total, burns 7.2 kg of wood, retains 0.40 kg of salt, loses 20.44 percent of the raw weight, and yields 15.91 kg of finished product at 0.452 kg of fuel per kg finished and a total cost of USD 0.63 per kg finished. Cold smoking followed by drying takes 108.0 hours, burns 9.6 kg of wood, retains 0.50 kg of salt, loses 35.0 percent of the raw weight, and yields 13.0 kg at 0.738 kg of fuel per kg finished and USD 1.22 per kg finished. Labour, not fuel or salt, is the largest cost line on both routes at the stated prices. Cold smoking alone, without the drying stage, does not cook the fish and does not by itself produce a storable product: the product never exceeds 25 °C, which is 38.0 degrees below a stated cooked core reference of 63 °C, and salting plus cold smoking alone remove only 12.0 percent of the raw weight, leaving 17.6 kg from which drying still has to remove a further 4.6 kg. SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED.