CountryByNet.com Forums :: It's BBQ season again

There are probably more little nuances of BBQ technique than there are practitioners of BBQ. As to a comment along the lines of Propane has no place in a good BBQ rig, I say NOT SO! I have eaten professionally prepared BBQ that was cooked mostly by heat from a propane fire. It was indirect heat as the fire heated the bottom of a container that had the racks for the meat and the products of combustion were not in contact with the meat. Not that the combustion gasses would be bad for flavor but the chamber with the meat had wood for producing "flavor smoke" and the air was controlled for controlling the burning of the flavor wood and was not influenced by the combustion needs of the propane fire.

This allowed thermostatic control of the temp of the meat chamber as the propane fire could cycle on and off as required to maintain the optimum cooking chamber temp and the dampers controlling air into the cooking chamber could be adjusted manually by experienced operators to produce optimum smoke effects. The two controls interact but aren't hard to adjust as once the thermostat is set that controls the propane fire you do what you want to the wood smoke fire and the propane fire cycles as required.

This uses a lot less flavor wood than conventional BBQ rigs but can produce a lot more flavor smoke on less wood. The meat can get the optimum cooking environment and the optimum flavoring environment. You can make really strongly flavored and tasty meats with various flavor woods and combinations of flavor woods but have the overall cooking control of thermostatically controlled gas cookinig.

The layout of the cooker was pretty simple. Basically concentric containers. It looked a lot like two big pipes of different sizes, one inside the other in a concentric arrangement. The propane fire was at the bottom between the inner and outer tanks and the fire and heat wrapped around the inner container and the exhaust flue was on top near the center. The outer container was insulated on the outside to increase efficiency, reduce fuel consumption, and promote even heating of the inner container. The inner container was accessed through doors in one end. The other end had the attached flavor wood burning chamber with its dampers. I don't know if the flavor wood was partially gas fire heated or if the gas burner in that part was just for starting the wood fire. What I do know was that there were some truly amazing flavors of meat prepared with this cooker. The smoke flavoring was adjustable but due to the separation of flavoring smoke production and cooking heat production you could make some really potently smoked meat without overcooking.

The rig was portable, trailer mounted, and used by a guy and helpers who catered BBQ outings. Some of my relatives in Mississippi belonged to a BBQ club where the members take turns in rotation supplying the meat for the monthly BBQ. Most times this caterrer was used. The club even had a permanent picnic ground set up with tables and lights. They would typically do both beef and pork with turkey and venison in small "sample" quantities.

Once in a while, given a good excuse, a subset of the club would seine a farm pond and have a fish fry. Our family arriving on vacation to visit served as that excuse a couple times. Three legged black cast iron wash pots were hung over wood fires, filled with oil (lard mostly) and brought to heat and they'd dump in fish and scoop them out when they floated to the top and turned the right shade of golden brown on the cornmeal coating.

As a youngster I didn't like meal on my fish but preferred flour. This created quite a stir among the cooking crew who were amused by the food preferrences of that "northern boy."

Incidently, our laundry was boiled in the same pots over wood fires as well. No to to go into great detail but this was not too long prior to the social changes wrought and or initiated by the most reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Pat

"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"

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