When you're using a brine to smoke meat, or any other product for that matter, it is important to have a salt/acid based brine! The idea is to "cure" the outside of the product and form a pellicle, or a sticky or dry skin on it to help absorb the smoke flavor! Therefore, after brining it for the desired amount of time, you drain the brine and hang the meat in the fridge and let the air dry the surface of the meat to form the pellicle! How long to brine the product depends on what product you are using! Delicate products like fish don't require a brine at all, only a mild salt and sugar rub! Poultry is also on the delicate side and should only be cured for maybe 4 hours before removing it from the brine! Heavy cuts like beef and pork may take up to 2 days in the brine, but certainly overnight!
Hanging it to form the pellicle can take as much as a couple days for heavy cuts of meat as well, but you want the "skin" to be tacky to the touch, almost somewhat taut and with resistance!
The smoking itself is an art as well, in that you don't want to "cook" the meat with heat from the smoking process! Isolating the smoke box from the heat chamber will allow the smoke to cure the meat instead of the heat cooking the meat! The best smokers out there actually have no firebox at all, only a small box to put the wood in, and that slides over a metal rod that gets hot and smoulders the wood inside the box causing it to smoke, but produces no heat! This is called cold smoking! I understand that most people have the hot smokers that sit outside, and that's ok as long as you keep the heat down as much as possible!
Hope the tamales come out as good as they sound!! Good luck, Geof
