The Offset Smoker Cookbook: Pitmaster Techniques and Mouthwatering Recipes for Authentic, Low-and-Slow BBQ

By Chris Grove

Discover how to make authentic, competition-quality BBQ with your offset smoker in this cookbook and guide by a professional pitmaster.

Serving up flavor-packed recipes and step-by-step techniques, The Offset Smoker Cookbook will have you smoking like a true pitmaster in no time. It features everything from pro tips on flavoring with smoke to little-known tricks for maintaining perfect temperature control. The easy-to-follow recipes and helpful color photos guarantee you’ll be making the best barbecue of your life, including mouth-watering meals such as:

• Green Chile Crusted Flank Steak Tacos
• Beef Chorizo Stuffed Peppers
• Pineapple Habanero Baby Back Ribs

Your offset smoker is the best appliance for taking your barbecue to the next level. So open this book, fire up your smoker and start impressing family, friends and neighbors with your delicious barbecue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781612439259

Book preview

Chapter 1

SO, YOU BOUGHT AN OFFSET SMOKER; WHAT’S NEXT?

The first smoker that I ever had was a cheap offset smoker. It was a Father’s Day present and I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning about firing up the pit. I couldn’t wait to make some incredible smoky, delicious barbecue.

After assembling my new smoker, I loaded the firebox with a mountain of briquettes and dumped a glowing chimney full of live briquettes on top. The temperatures shot up quickly, I slammed the vents almost closed, and it went downhill from there. I was chasing temps and battling thick, white clouds of smoke. The afternoon ended in utter disappointment.

I’m writing this book for people in that same predicament. You’ve just gotten a backyard-level offset smoker and you’re excited to get smoking, but you don’t know where to start. Or maybe you’ve had one for a while but it sits neglected, and you just haven’t used it much because you don’t feel confident with it. I hope this book will give you insight on how to get started with your smoker and a path for exploring all that it can do.

The recipes, techniques, and tips that I share are things that have worked for me. There’s always more than one way to achieve something, and if you have a way that works better for you, then keep at it.

My then-seven-year-old son, Trevor, loading spareribs into the first smoker I ever had — a Brinkmann Smoke’N Pit Professional offset smoker.

TOP 10 TAKEAWAYS

Here is what you should understand even if you get nothing else from this book. These are the things I would emphasize if you asked for my help, but I had only 10 minutes to give you some pointers. Focusing on these areas should give you the best chance of success.

1. Start with a small fire and grow it gradually to get the heat you need. See Chapters 2 and 4.

2. Use a water pan in an offset smoker every time.

3. Use a charcoal basket for maximum airflow.

4. Start off using charcoal as your fuel base and wood splits for smoke flavor. Save the all-wood fires until you feel that you have mastered your smoker.

5. Smoke that makes barbecue taste good is invisible, or thin bluish-white. Heavy white smoke looks cool but tastes terrible.

6. Go by the cooking temperature at the level of your food grates, not the thermometers up on the smoker lid.

7. Use the air intake vent on the firebox to control your airflow and temperatures; leave the smokestack damper open in most cases.

8. Make small adjustments with your vents and controls.

9. Preheat all of the smoke wood and replenishing fuel. The closer they are to their ignition point when they go in the firebox, the better.

10. Practice and pay attention. When it comes to mastering an offset smoker, there is no substitute for experience using that smoker.

ABOUT OFFSET SMOKERS

Legend has it that the offset smoker was born on the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma. Oil workers with plenty of time and ingenuity began using what they had available to make smokers for themselves, friends, and family. Then, when oil took an economic downturn in the early 1980s, some of the companies working in the oil fields began selling the smokers commercially.

A look at the growth of Oklahoma Joe’s, a widely available brand of offset smokers, shows how the popularity of these smokers took off. In 1987, Joe Davidson made a dozen of his offset smokers and took them to the Oklahoma State Fair in hopes of selling them. Sell them he did! He sold out and came home with orders for 100 more. It was the start of something big. Just seven years later, the business had gotten so good that Oklahoma Joe’s had to move into a facility staffed with 150 employees and the capacity to create 100,000 units a year. Things kept growing, and just over 10 years after that fateful state fair, Joe sold the company.

The demand for offset smokers has persisted. They fill backyards across the country and are in use all around the world. Ask someone in the general public what a smoker looks like; chances are they’ll describe the black steel, side-mounted firebox, and smokestack of an offset pit.

ANATOMY OF AN OFFSET SMOKER

The above is the general layout of most offset smokers. The firebox can be on either side and can be other shapes. The smokestack can be mounted on the side, top, or back of the smoker. The air intake vent(s) can be a variety of designs.

OFFSET SMOKER CONFIGURATIONS

Horizontal offset smoker.

In a standard or horizontal offset smoker, a fire of wood or charcoal burns in the firebox, which is offset lower to the side. The heat and smoke enter the cylindrical cooking chamber through an opening and circulate around the food. The smoke and heat exit the smoker through a smokestack on the opposite side of the firebox. When this design is used with the smokestack attached high in the smoker, there can be significant temperature differences between the top and bottom, as well as the right and left sides of the cooking chamber. This is because the airflow can rise from the firebox opening, follow along the top of the cooking chamber, and escape out of the smokestack. I’ll address this in the Modifications section.

A vertical offset smoker is similar; the cooking chamber, however, is in a vertical orientation. Some people prefer this configuration because it has a smaller footprint than a horizontal offset smoker and because this design allows for hanging ribs, sausages, and other foods.

Vertical offset smoker.

The reverse flow offset smoker is designed to tame the temperature variations in the cooking chamber. In this horizontal offset smoker, the smoke and heat are guided through the lower half of the cooking chamber by a baffle plate or a system of piping. Then the heat and smoke travel back across the top and out the smokestack, which is mounted on the same side as the firebox.

Reverse flow offset smoker.

There are also combo smokers that include a gas grill, side burner, and a small offset smoker that doubles as a charcoal grill.

PRICE SPECTRUM OF OFFSET SMOKERS

Offset smokers also vary greatly in quality and price, which are tightly correlated.

Entry level — Priced $200 and under. I won’t name names, but extremely cheap smokers are usually just that. The thin metal and undersized fireboxes often found on cheap offsets make them non-functional. I’m not saying that you can’t find a decent smoker at this price; sometimes you’ll find great deals on closeouts.

Backyard level — Priced between $250 and $1,000. There are some fantastic, fully functional smokers in this price range.

Examples include the Oklahoma Joe’s Longhorn Reverse Flow and the Yoder Smokers Cheyenne. There are some duds in this price range as well.

Enthusiast level — Priced above $1,000. Examples include the Yoder Smokers Loaded Wichita, Lone Star Grillz 24 × 48, and Meadow Creek TS120.

Pro level — Priced $10,000 and above. Examples include models from Jambo Pits, 4T Champion, and El Rey.

So what’s the difference between a $500 offset smoker and a $12,000 offset smoker (besides $11,500)?

Below is a chart that lists some features to expect, based on the price level. Enthusiast-level offset smokers exist somewhere between the two ends.

In general, these features add up to mean that a higher-end offset smoker is going to have more stable temperatures, will burn longer, will consume less fuel, and will require less babysitting during cooks.

OPERATIONAL BASICS

I think the relationship between the pitmaster and the fire is more intimate with an offset smoker than other smokers. With high-efficiency smokers using computer-controlled blowers, like insulated box smokers and kamado grills, the fire is precise and tightly controlled, but you are less involved in the equation. Offset smokers require a hands-on approach. Their fires are more dynamic. To understand how to operate or control an offset smoker requires a solid understanding of the nature of fire.

FIRE TRIANGLE AND THE SMOKER

The fire triangle provides an excellent visualization for the process that we’re trying to manage in the firebox.

All three elements — fuel, heat, and oxygen — must be in place for a fire to occur. But the firebox reality is more complex than that because we want a specific fire that creates a specific amount of heat and a certain type of smoke. Our goal is to make sure that all three elements are in place in the right amounts to produce that fire. Let’s look at the three elements and the pitmaster’s role in each.

Fuel — This is wood and charcoal. There has to be enough fuel present, but the pitmaster’s impact is more than just dumping a bag of coal in a firebox. The pitmaster chooses the type and quality of the fuel. The pitmaster arranges the fuel in the firebox. The pitmaster lights the fuel. The pitmaster decides when to refuel and how to do that. The pitmaster controls the timing of when wood is added for smoke.

Heat — The pitmaster provides the initial heat in the form of ignition. I talk more about that in Chapter 2, but how you light your fire affects it from the start. After that, the heat comes from the chemical reaction of fire, but the pitmaster can impact that though the other two elements.

Oxygen — A fire has to breathe, and this is where the pitmaster exerts the most influence by controlling the air intake vents and smokestack damper.

You might notice that the fire triangle graphic isn’t exactly a triangle. I like using a Venn diagram instead because it highlights three potential trouble areas:

Low fuel — In this situation, there is plenty of heat and oxygen, but fuel is burning down. At first, you will see temperature swings because, as fuel gets low, the coals aren’t making contact with other coals. At this point, it will be difficult to refuel because you aren’t going to have the heat needed to jump-start a big batch of coal. Adding a chimney of glowing coals will get you back in action.

Low oxygen: smothering or choking fire — The temps are up and there is plenty of fuel, but the fire is smoldering because there isn’t enough airflow. This could be because the smokestack damper is closed, backfilling the smoker with stale smoke and smothering the fire. Another cause could be that your air intake vent is closed too much, choking the fire by keeping air from reaching the heat and fuel. Or it could be that ash is clogging the airflow in the firebox. A lot of ash below and among the coals can significantly disrupt airflow.

Low heat — This situation occurs when the coals have died down too much and a large amount of cold charcoal has been added to the firebox. You can stoke the fires by blowing on the area that does have live charcoal burning; this will increase the intensity while you try to recover your fire. If you have a gas torch or weed burner, you can jump-start the newly added coals by relighting the area of charcoal near the existing fire.

THERE IS NO SPOON

In a scene in The Matrix, a child prodigy tells Neo the secret to bending the spoon without touching it was to realize the truth that there is no spoon. Well, here’s a bake your noodle moment about what’s going on in your firebox: wood doesn’t burn.

It took me a while to wrap my brain around that one the first time that I heard it. I mean, I can see the wood burning! What does happen is that we heat wood and other fuel to the point that it starts breaking down and releases vapors. It is those colorless vapors that burn.

Famed pitmaster Aaron Franklin tells us it is the burning of those invisible vapors that accomplishes 90 percent of the smoking process. Everything that you see in smoke, such as water, carbon monoxide, creosote, and soot, is the product of incomplete combustion.

So our goal is a clean-burning fire that approaches total combustion. To me, that means the best fire for an offset smoker is the smallest fire possible to support our cooking temperature, burning as hot as possible with as much air as possible. Let’s compare two fires to demonstrate what I mean.

The resulting cooking temperature may be the same in both fire scenarios, but the situations are entirely different.

In Fire A, fewer coals are burning hotter with plenty of air. It is an efficient fire with a high level of combustion. The exhaust will be clean, imparting good-tasting smoke to the food. The unlit coals adjacent to the fire will ignite cleanly because of the adequate heat and air. The fire is as stable as a controlled burn.

In Fire B, twice the amount of coals are burning, but only half as hot. Lower heat and less oxygen cause incomplete combustion. The coals smolder, creating smoke with soot and particulates that we don’t want on our food. The coals struggle to burn efficiently, making them prone to temperature swings. The unlit coals have a harder time igniting because the lit coals aren’t burning as hot. The fire is burning but unstable.

Fire A is burning the smallest fire possible, burning as hot as possible with as much air as possible.

I will go into more detail on lighting fires, fuel choices, and fuel strategies in the next three chapters. For now, I will say that for a beginner to have the best chance of success, you should start by using a basket of charcoal that is lit in a single spot and then grown into the fire that you need.

OFFSET SMOKER CONTROLS

The typical controls of an offset smoker are straightforward — one or more air intake vents on the firebox and a damper on the smokestack.

Smokestack Damper

For backyard-level offset smokers, the damper is usually a metal plate that slides over the top of the smokestack opening. I recommend leaving that wide open unless you have a reason not to and, even then, don’t shut it more than halfway. Shutting the smokestack damper too much will stop the airflow and backfill the smoker with stale smoke. That stale smoke makes the food taste bitter and cools quickly, robbing your smoker of heat. Shutting the damper too much will at first make the cooking temperature spike because the damper has trapped the heat in the cooker. But then the reduced airflow will cause the coals to die down, resulting in a temperature drop. About the only time that I partially close a smokestack damper is on a windy day, when the wind will pull the exhaust out faster than usual.

Air Intake Vents

This is a vent or vents on the firebox that control the airflow into