Cleaning smoker for inspection?

Hey All,

So I'm getting my first inspection on my food trailer tomorrow. I've been cooking everyday for about 8 months now, but somehow they just forgot about me. So I'm giving my trailer a solid clean and I'm wondering how much time I should devote to cleaning the smoker. It's a large hog-style smoker where the grease drains out the bottom, but unfortunately there's quite a few uneven spots where the grease clumps up.

In your experience do they have you pull the whole cooker apart and inspect everything like they do inside the food truck / food trailer? I clean it out every week but it's never going to look as good as it did when I first got it.

Any other advice or particular areas to give extra attention to would be appreciated. I work on a Marine Corps base so the people inspecting it are called Preventative Medicine and the Army Veterinarians.

HBMTN said:

I've never had an inspector dissect a cooker but they do look inside. Nothing cleans mine better than bring it up to 300 degrees and then hitting it with a garden hose and closing the lid to let it steam. Repeat that two to three times and she is in great shape!

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Thank you very much for the feedback. That's exactly what I've been doing all afternoon, so I should be good to go.

Passed my inspection with a perfect score. I was nervous as all hell but things are good to go. Thanks for the advice HBMTN...exactly what I did and it worked out well. Smoker is huge and a pain to break down and clean, so this was a good way of getting it super clean in a short period of time.