To explain what I mean, I think you can level up a cooking style. For example, pasta. At level 1, you’re boiling dried pasta and adding sauce out of a jar. At level 1, you add your own spices. Level 3, switch to fresh pasta. Level 4, make your own sauce. And finally at level 5, make the pasta from scratch.
So with BBQ, I guess level 1 would be cooking the meat so it’s neither burnt nor underdone. Maybe level 2 is mixing different meats/cuts that have different heat/time requirements and cooking well. Further levels = ?
I generally agree with this order, but my journey took me in a different order. After having propane forever I moved to a Weber and the snake method, but then I went with an offset with a real fire box.
After getting really good results but not always having enough time to stoke the fire for 12+ hours I bought a very high end pellet smoker that I converted to also use charcoal and wood.
My stick burner gets used maybe once a year now. I’ll go pellet at least once a week, and charcoal or wood in the converted pellet at least once a month. I also can build a makeshift konro inside my pellet smoker, and I use that all the time.
Oh right, I also have an offset vertical smoker, and hunt a lot of my own protein, so yeah, it’s a deep hole I’ve dug into.
I’ve been thinking about buying a pellet smoker because my grocery sells the pellets now but I have two smokers and my friend is a big dude — a former offensive lineman — and he loves nothing more than drinking beer and tending to a fire. He loves monitoring the temperature and soaking the wood in water to get it just right. He probably should/could smoke meat for a living and be happy forever.
I like to keep it simple and am into technology so I have wireless thermometers and love my barrel smoker where, once you learn the quirks, it’s basically set it and forget it and get perfect ribs. But I feel like I’d be taking something from a friend if I didn’t also have the 12 hours of beer and monitoring to the temp/fire part. That’s his form of meditation.
I hear you, it’s definitely a zen state.
I live walking distance from the ocean, so it’s nice to set a pellet up and monitor it from the beach. Run back when it’s time to wrap/spray/etc, and then hang on the sand until the internal temps remind me it’s time to head home and rest everything in a cooler.
All of my sausage, fish, and jerky goes in the vertical smoker. I have to manually tend the fire on that, but the temp swings and fuel consumption are much more stable, so it’s generally quite a bit easier than minding my normal offset.
Chilling in the yard to tend fire and empty a 30 rack with the neighbor is fun for sure, and my stick burner develops better bark than the pellet, even if I use wood in it. So when I want to go all in on a competition, or I’m doing like 8 briskets at a time for a huge event I’ll run the stick burner. Otherwise it’s something in the pellet smoker.
Yeah I think the ability/know how to use the wood burning smoker is more important than actually using it. I can do it but after starting a family I don’t have the time for tending those longer sessions. But putting it on the pellet smoker and being able to forget it until the thermometer chirps is bliss