Anyone else here barbecue?
 

The real thing - low, slow and woodsmoke?

Oh yeah.

low slow but because I like to eat the same day I cook, I usually use chicken. I know I know, brisket, pork butt, rubs mops, yeah yeah. but it's still pink and fallin off the bone. bbq enough for my appetite.

One of these days I want to get a *real* rig, like a 55 gal drum split and hinged with an outboard firebox. *sigh*.. someday.

i'll throw a brisket or a whole chicken or turkey or snapper....ohhhhh me vewy vewy hungwy now.

last memorial day weekend

edit:added pic

BigV - you should try ribs. Baby backs only take four hours. Spares only take 5-6 hours.

I had an Oklahoma Joe smoker, but I finally had to retire it. I now have one of these. I can highly recommend them.

Well I try http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=6277 and http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=7377 Maybe some more in the food thread. My grills might be in Dodads, but I'll try to move them to http://www.flickr.com/photos/busterb along with some food. The 4th coming up and my Bday the 7th, might be a cooking time. :lol:

Nice work buster. As it happens, I am doing my first beer-in-the-butt chickens this weekend. I hope they turn out as nice as yours looked.

I just bought a weber charcoal grill last summer. Can it do the long slow type of bbq? I've only had that kind at bbq places.

There was this one place where you could eat the chicken bones they were so tender. I think the guy parboiled the chix in bbq sauce, but I'm not sure.

Can you give me some pointers?

If I need a new rig I can build one this summer. I've got a couple of brick/stone projects coming up so I could divert a bit while I'm in mason mode and make a small bbq pit. specs?

Man, now I'm hungry thinking about it.

time to forage in the fridge.

Yes, but not easily. True BBQ requires temps ~ 225 to 275. That's a fair amount of work to do in a Weber grill.

Having said that, I did BBQ ribs in my weber for years before I bought a smoker.

Here's the gist:

• Buy some baby-back ribs. These are the easiest to learn on.
• Look in a book like "Smoke and Spice" for recipes for rib rubs. Prepare the ribs for BBQ.
• Build a small fire on one side of the weber.
• Add a couple of lumps of hickory or other smoking wood. DO NOT USE SOFT WOODS!!!
• Put a water pan on the other side.
• Put the grill back in the weber.
• Put the ribs in a rib rack over the water pan.
• Put the lid on with the vent over the ribs..
• Stand a candy thermometer in one of the lid vent holes.
• Start with all vents completely open.
• After 15-30 minutes close bottom vents as needed to keep temps in BBQ range.
• Try to remove the lid as little as possible.
• On the other hand you have to add charcoal and wood from time to time to keep the temp.

If you have any taste buds at all, once you've done your own BBQ, you will become a BBQ snob. Very few BBQ places do as good a job as you can do at home.

BBQ is much easier to do in a decent smoker. I really like the Weber Smokey Mountain for convenience, but there are a number of other options out there. I recommend you avoid the cheepie $39-100 water smokers. They take as much work as the weber grill.

Building your own is non-trivial as you need to have a separate firebox and smoke chamber. There's one description here. You can find others by googling "brick smoker".

Thanks Dar,
I can get hickory up here, I'm about at the edge of its growing range. Lots of hard maple, though.

Never had a chance at maple. I hear it's really good for pork.

We're thinking of digging a BBQ pit this summer. However, we're afraid it will become/stay wet inside and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes (we live in West Nile central), and just generally be more trouble than it's worth.

busterb, you're a Mississippian in good standing, how do they do pits down there? Anyone else have experience with this?

BBQ pits are (or should be) mostly closed systems. The only openings should be an air intake vent next to the fire, an exit vent for the smoke, and a drip drain for the fat that comes off the meat. Most smokers have a method of closing the exit and intake vents. And the drip drain exits down. So if you close the vents when you're done Qing, you should be ok if the pit is well designed.

you can also find fab shops that dabble in making pits when they're not building something else. i don't have a decent pic here at work but if you look at the link to the pit i have on post #3 you can get an idea. this pit was made in luling texas by a tank manufacturing company. the cooker box is 1/8" steel 24"x18"x18" and the fire box is 18"x18"x18" with a 3 foot by 4"+/- exhaust stack. I think it was around $200 bucks. my dad had bought it for me for my birthday one year. hehe, damn thing almost got me kicked out of my apartment i was renting at the time for smoking a few turkeys and smoke damaging the patio ceiling......all in all, i LOVE this smoker.

We have one of those bullet shaped smokers , they do a good job but take work , keeping the fire rite , and the water changed .
Oh smokeing a goose is an experance i DON'T think i will try again , TASTY !!! But these fuckers have MORE grease than a Jiffie lube !!!!!!!
Fucking domestic goose !!! I May try a wild goose one day , AFTER i finaly get the greese stain off the back porch

Beer butt chicken , we got on of those racks a wally-world a while back , it was SOOO GOOD and soo easy , that when i saw this in a Cabelas catalog ,
http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/te...075&hasJS=true
My wife Had to have it for her Bday !! ( HER idea , not mine )
we have used it VERRRRRRY Happly for about 6 months now , this thing ROCKS !!!!!!!
The instructions say to get it up to 350 deg for 1 1/2 hr , personaly I have NEVER been able to get it over 300 deg , but after 1 hr the chicken is falling off the bones !!!! We have tryed a few different recipe's .
This weekend we are doing 3 birds at once , one with dry 'Q rub , one cajun butter , and one like hot wings ( HOT chicken !!!) ,
I will take pics of the process and post them .

Someday, when I have a house and space and time to kill, I will own one of <a href="http://www.biggreenegg.com/">these</a> and start smoking beef brisket like a mad bastard.

PIts are up here http://www.flickr.com/photos/busterb, Maybe food tomorrow.

The kajan m-wave, wooden bar-b-que??????? :worried:

that's a pretty cool concept! i like!

I Q'd beef brisket over the weekend. It was my foray into brisket and I was a little nervous. But it came out great. Very tender and moist.

I grew up in St. Louis where BBQ is all about pork - mostly ribs with the occaisional pulled pork. But I tell you what. Brisket gives them a run for the money in the "what to Q" race. Mmmmm. Heaven on a plate.

I think Cali is one of the few places people Q tri-tip - lotsa garlic, salt, and pepper, slow cook for a couple hundred hours - yum!

That's the only place I've seen the tri-tip done. They have another name for it in the Bay area. Have wanted to try it here, but can't find any.

I want a *REAL* barbeque. Something I can cook a dozen hams on. A whole flock of turkeys. A barrel of butts. Why? I have a penchant for overbuilding anything I make. And my next project is a combo smoker/grill.

I was over at my friend's place the other day, and he's working on a trailer rig. I don't have the acreage to house that kind of rolling iron, but it turns out, that the changes he was making to it involved removing the portion that was his smoker unit. A little wheelin and dealin later and I became the proud owner of a 24" diameter, 48" tall, 3/8" wall steel beast. Not to mention a double hernia.

My first step will be to make a stand for it, and some wheels. My buddy said he'd loan me his truck and let me use the forklift to load it, but after that, I was on my own. So, wheels==good.

I did take some preliminary pictures, but they're crap, so when I get some more, I'll post them.

My goal is to make a unit that I can smoke with, bbq with and grill with. I have plenty of steel and a friend with a welder. What do yo think? Can it be done? Will the variety of functions cripple them all? Vertical? Horizontal?

Please, don't all shout at once. I'll read every post, I guarantee it. I'm looking forward to your input.

BigV, I'm outta my league here, but I do know how much your chunk o' happiness weighs.
(reaching for pocket ref)

24"ø @ 3/8" = 95#/ft

So that's a 390# chunk o' fun. Spring for the Heavy Duty locking casters. :)

If you only wanted a smoker, then I'd go vertical. The temperature will be more consistent over the whole smoker. However, since you want to grill on it too, I think you need to go horizontal.

If you go vertical you get Pi*24^2 or ~452 square inches of grilling space. If you go horizontal you get 24 * 48 or 1152 square inches of grilling space.

You can compensate for the drawbacks of the horizontal design through certain tweaks. Do a net search on "silver smoker mods". That'll give you some ideas.

BTW - Smoking and bbqing require pretty much the same design. The only difference is the temperature.

Either way is fine, I've built a few pits in the last 45 yrs. One thing I know, is as soon as finished you'll see something you'll wish to change or add. I don't recommend cutting doors or any big openings all at once. Skip around and leave a little bit holding, ever foot or so. And let cool. Or the sob will spring open. Also tack any hinges on before final cut.

Anytime the hubby fires up the charcoal the first thing I do is peel a white onion, rub butter on it, cut an "X" about 3/4 of the way through it, fill it with a spoonful of butter and wrap it in aluminum foil. It's the first thing on the grill and the last thing off. It's tender and sweet (as sweet as a white onion can be anyway). Love them!

Aw, now this is my kind of thread! I love BBQ! For about three years, my dad and I hd neither an operational oven or stove, so whatever we didn't get delivered, we bbq'd.

A couple of my favorites:

* Smoked pork chops, using apple cider and applewood

* Smoked t-bone steaks

* Salmon fillets cooked on cedar planks

* Grilled canteloupe

I just got married two weeks ago and had the reception in my backyard. I grilled for 40 people, making tri-tip steaks (not the roasts - they'd have been charcoal) and chicken breasts. I made up a wicked marinade, too, using lime, three kinds of chili powder, salt (just a little), black pepper, brown sugar, and garlic. At this point, I'm having to eamil the recipe to all the folks who cam ebecause it really did come out well!

TOOT TOOT!

That's me tooting my own horn. :)

So....would you post the recipe? Sounds great!!

Darned if I can find any of the conversations I've had with y'all on this topic. Were *all* of them in my head?

I have a new (to me) smoker. It's a lovely offset firebox unit from New Braunfels. I've gotten many meals from it, and today's feast is salmon jerky.

I bought a couple of medium/small Copper River sockeyes from The Fish Co. down the street. I wanted to make strips, so I got whole fish and cut inch-ish wide strips the length of the fish. This was a LOT harder to do than I expected. Also (flippin rookie mistake) I checked but failed to discern that the fish were NOT scaled until I'd already filleted them. Crap. So, the strips took a thrashing as I scaled the narrow strips. They're kind of ugly. Anyhow, I'd also intended to hang them in pairs and smoke them vertically so I kept pairs of them intact at the top. I'd intended to hang them like hand dipped candles. But, I changed my mind when I realized how much crap I'd have to macguyver to mate the two smokers (the other one is a Brinkman's Bullet).

I made a marinade of two pounds of brown sugar, one pound of non iodized salt, a cup of teriyaki sauce, a cup of ginger liqueur and salt and pepper and enough water to cover the fish. It made about eight inches in my five gallon food bucket. I let it marinate at room temperature overnight.

This morning, I despaired of smoking because the weather forecast was for a high of 63 and showers. It looked like that until midday when the sun broke out. I then moved to the backyard and started a chimney of mesquite lump charcoal in the chimney starter. I came back in and took the strips out of the bucket and laid them on the oven rack which I'd placed over the sink.

At this point I'd previously just tossed the chunks (not strips) into the smoker, but recipes I'd read told me that the development of the "PELLICLE" was very important to the quality of the finished product. I have to admit that the warnings were strong enough to overcome my usual impatience as I waited and patted dry and bathed them in the wash of hot air from the blow dryer until I could detect the presence of the shiny tacky sealed surface on the fish, or at least on most of the fish. This meant I could load the smoker a bit at a time. and I did working from the coldest part of the racks furthest from the firebox and working my way toward the firebox.

There were pictures along the way, but I'm in the middle of a picture/camera/computer crisis so, you'll have to wait for those. The strips have been on the smoker for an hour or so at this point, I might risk another picture soon.

The salmon's off the smoker and in the fridge (and in my belly and SonofV's, his friend, and some other adults for quality control). It is delicious. I netted about seven pounds of product and I started with about ten pounds of fish. One-third loss is about what I expect with pork, it seems in line here too.

It's sooooo tasty. zomg... Yes, yes, there are pictures. Good thing too, because the fish won't last.

True Barbecuing would be another of the things on the long list of things I'm not allowed to do in my apt.

Pictures? Of course there are pictures.

Over here.

I missed your acquisition of the NB smoker. Your salmon pictures look great.

Tonight a Pork Roast wrapped in bacon, dry rub season.

And I am going to try to roast chestnuts over an open fire.

http://bbq.about.com/od/fruitandvege.../aa122008a.htm

That sounds like the good stuff!