View Single Post
Old 06-29-2013, 01:33 AM   #39
Know Bull
On the road to being a farker
 
Join Date: 04-19-12
Location: Broken Arrow OK
Default

I see the best teams in the country cooking predominately on either a Jambo or an FEC100. It seems there are more switching to Jambos.

Jambos are really a good looking cooker. A true stick burner. Good design for relatively even heat flow; but the design is certainly not rocket science. But from watching people cook on them, they are far from being a "set it and forget it' cooker. I see the cooks having to monitor closely and make lots of adjustments during the cooking process. The cooker is very well designed for competition, but is extremely high priced per square inch of cooking area. It is not really designed for catering or large parties, and is not cost effective as a business cooker. The design and finish on the cooker is top notch. VERY difficult to find a used one, and be prepared for up to a 9 month wait to get a new one. Expensive - check the website.

FEC100 is a bargain when looking to both cooking space and ease of use. But since it uses wood pellets instead of real wood, it just does not seem to put as much smoke flavor into the product. And there are a lot of 'steakhouse style' restaurants that find this cooker large enough to meet their needs for the BBQ portion of their menu. (As an aside, I still have an old Cookshack Model 50 smoker made by the same company. It is an electric smoker that cannot be used in KCBS competition. It is a busy person's answer to cooking, especially for a crowd, but just cannot deliver the same smoke as a real wood fire. Cookshack/FEC are very good quality products with excellent customer service.)

Having said all that, people cook on a little bit of everything.

I started off cooking contests on 2 big green eggs and 1 Hasty-Bake Legacy. The problem with my setup was (a) regulating multiple fires takes a toll on you and reduces your focus; and (b) it takes a lot of space and work to haul, load and unload multiple cookers.

Hasty-Bake is an outstanding all purpose cooker for the home chef. But it is not really well suited to competition. While I recommend the cooker, scratch it off the competition list.

Big Green Eggs are outstanding for the home smoker. But they are extremely heavy and hard to load and unload. They may also break (ceramic) if you are not careful in transport. Once you learn them, they are truly set and forget. I highly recommend a BBQ Guru with them; it is like setting a thermostat on an oven.

I have since purchased a used Backwoods Gater smoker. I have been pleased with my results so far. My scores have improved since I can now cook my entire contest on a single cooker; and my attitude has improved due to the far easier setup/teardown effort required. This would make a very good home smoker too, as a water smoker makes temperature control pretty easy. Not as easy as setting the thermostat on the FEC100, but is really close to set and forget for several hours. The problem with water smokers in general is that steam tends to remove smoke flavor from meat. It is also difficult to get the 'smoke ring' appearance without chemically inducing it. They work really good at temps of 250 or less; they start to steam excessively at temps above 250.

Reverse flow cookers (such as a Lang) work really well when cooking low and slow. By forcing the heat to travel all the way to the end of the cooker and back, a stable cooking environment is created. However, if you want to cook hot and fast, there is a challenge. The baffle at the bottom will get really hot if you try to increase the heat too much, and the fat that drips down on that baffle will burn and create an acrid smoke in the cooker. Not pretty at high heat.

There are a lot of teams that compete on cheap Weber smokers, or something homemade with less than desirable designs. But if you just learn your cooker, then you can turn out a good product on just about anything.

There is no perfect cooker. Research and buy what fits your style. Then resign yourself to the fact that you will keep buying cookers looking for the holy grail for so long as you compete.
__________________
Know Bull
Know Bull is offline   Reply With Quote


Thanks from:--->