The better automated smoker

Better than Traeger, better than offset, combining the two.

Growing up in Texas, I always enjoyed BBQ. Primarily eating it--I didn't have any experience making it myself. (And when I say BBQ, I am not referring to cookouts that people often call BBQs with hamburgers and hot dogs. I am referring to smoked meats.) But that all changed when I bought my own smoker when I was about 19 years old from a garage sale. It was a vertical, electric smoker, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I just saw that it was only $15. So I picked it up, went to the store and got some drum sticks and pecan wood chips. I threw together some homemade rub and popped them in. I had no idea what settings I should use, how often I should add chips, or how to even control it--it did not come with an instruction manual. So I pushed some buttons and it started getting hot. I was excited but I didn't have high expectations. I had been living in a really small town in KS for the past 5 years, and we never really sought out BBQ, there wasn't anything in the town we lived in to my memory. So it had been about 5 years since I had had real BBQ. And that first bite was an instant blast of flavor and nostalgia. It was amazing. I had realized that the pecan wood had a transcendent quality to it, something that could never be produced by liquid smoke, seasonings, or a gas setup. It needed smoke, and that smoke needed wood. I was hooked and became a little obsessed with BBQ, seeking out all the best places in the Dallas area and watching youtube videos of how to cook the best ribs and briskets, even though I only had this tiny electric smoker that couldn't really fit either item.

I enjoyed great BBQ over the next few years. But I did very little cooking. The transient lifestyle of a 19-22 year old, living in different states, with friends, family, and strangers, going to school, doesn't really permit one to have a steady smoking setup. But that all changed when I married my wife. She happened to be an employee at Ace Hardware, which happened to sell the Big Green Egg. And because she was an employee, she got an astounding 50% discount. So as a wedding gift to me, she bought me a large Big Green Egg, and I was now able to start smoking. On it, I have smoked pork butts, brisket, whole chickens, turkey breasts, ribs, and I am sure a few others. It is an amazing and versatile cooker and I have absolutely loved it. But it doesn't come without its shortcomings. It takes a fair amount of effort to get it started, it has limited capacity, and I cannot use regular wood to smoke, I have to use dried woodchips for the smoke, and charcoal for the fuel. So for the past couple of years, I have longed for something that fixes these problems, something with a richer and deeper smoking ability, with more convenience and capacity. The obvious solution: a pellet smoker. But I have never had a brisket from a pellet smoker that exactly matched the quality of a top-tier Texas BBQ restaurant. So why is that? I can figure only one primary difference other than cooking experience, which I can't really control. I am as good as I am and I don't have time to become professionally trained. The BBQ restaurants almost entirely use conventional offset smokers, using real wood as the fuel and the smoke, not pellets. So that must be the primary difference. Pellets vs. real wood in a conventional offset. The tradeoff between these two is convenience and smoke quality. So that is the purpose of this project. How do I, as an amateur smoker, get both? I have had this idea since I first started using the Big Green Egg.

Because the pellets are the issue, the pellet smoker can not be made to have more natural smoke flavor, and the pellet smokers are not easily modifiable. So the only option I see is to make the conventional offset smoker convenient. And my ideas are fun and silly. Here are two illustrations.