Bigmista
somebody shut me the fark up.
IF you had to choose one to have in your restaurant, which would you choose and why?
Go with a Southern Pride...I'm just sayin
Which product delivers the best smoke ingrediant is my hijacking question?
Maybe I need to find someone locally with a 300 or larger and ask them to let me cook some product in it and see if I like it.
How do the FEC's work in a restaurant setting where they are running everyday for 20+ hours/day?
The reason I ask is that in restaurants and catering kitchens in California (at least in Long Beach) smokers need to be NSF certified even if they are outside.
I have not cooked on a commercial FE but have used the Southern Pride units 300 and 500.
Great smokers, consistent product, i also seem to get great yield (almost 70%) on butts. You do have to feed it logs regularly and i would guess the maintenance would be lower than the FE's.
The Old Hickorys are basically the same as the SP.
Good luck and where's the new location going to be? :thumb:
On edit...
You really want a non stop smoking machine, look at the JR Oyler.
Just sayin.
You might want to check on the cost of pellets vs. oak logs as well as storage for the logs compared to the bags of pellets. For me oak logs were cheaper than pellets and I had storage space for them. I put one log in at night for the overnight cook and that log was all it took since the OH and SP use gas for the primary heat source with the logs providing the smoke. The pellet units use pellets for heat as well as smoke so they use a lot more pellets than the log/gas units.
I have an FEC-500. I've cooked on Southern Prides as well on multiple occasions. In a commerical setting, the FEC-300,500,750 is the only choice for me. This summer we cooked 500+ lbs of pork butt and got a 64% yield. It is a fact that a pellet pit has a better average yield than gas or wood/charcoal.