Cold smoking (fake)

I don't have facilities for cold smoking. I was making a fermented sausage a few weeks ago that wanted a "light cold smoke" mainly to discourage the growth of mould, and I had a brainwave. If it's just to discourage mould, I thought to myself, then surely painting on this stuff …

… would do just as well. It is, after all, made from smoke that's been deposited on some surface or other and then dissolved, so it has all the same stuff in it that smoke from a fire has. Then I started thinking further. When you cold smoke something all you are doing is drying it and depositing this same stuff on the surface. Maybe liquid smoke would be good for more than just discouraging mould.

I tested my theory on one link of each of the two batches of sausage I had maturing by swabbing them with a paper towel dipped in liquid smoke, and guess what? They turned out tasting fabulous. So this week's batch of sausage (pepperoni, which is not meant to be smoked but who cares, I love smoke flavour), was hung up to dry overnight, and has now been bathed in liquid smoke:

And has been hung up again to dry and ferment.

I'm thinking I might just buy some pork belly and try smoky streaky bacon.