DaveAlvarado
is Blowin Smoke!
I borrowed an Old Country Pecos to try my hand at cooking on a stick burner. I cooked up a little bone-in pork loin roast (about 4 bones long) using hickory.
It was an interesting learning experience. A few things I learned:
1. Airflow is king. Yeah we should all know this, but if you're working on a cheap-ish offset, you have to worry about how well each stick can breathe. Just laying sticks in the firebox is a bad idea, better if you can put the stick over a heat source with some airflow underneath, meaning laying against the side of the firebox or something. Once I got the first couple sticks going, I'd add a new one by leaning one edge on a lit stick so it was propped up at an angle.
2. If you wait until the temp drops 50 degrees, you might have a hard time getting the next stick going. There was one point where I thought I was going to have to re-light the fire, but it ended up being ok.
3. Charcoal briquettes are a terrible starter. They're the wrong shape and if you lay a stick on a bed of ashed-over charcoal, the stick can't breathe well enough. Wood chunks on the other hand are a fantastic starter and can be lit in a chimney just like charcoal. I had some old pecan chunks I'm not using to cook with, they worked great. A half chimney of flaming wood chunks will get a log lit in no time and they do a great job of getting the cooker heated up.
I have a question about temp control. To keep a clean fire burning, I ended up leaving the firebox door open and the smoke stack wide open. Obviously that leads to fairly big temp swings--when a new stick goes in it spikes up, then slowly comes back down as the stick burns down. Food cooked ok and I was ok with the swings, but is there a way to make it more stable? I decided I didn't want to futz with air control for risk of making a dirty fire, since even with things wide open I sometimes wasn't quite getting TBS. Any tips?
It was an interesting learning experience. A few things I learned:
1. Airflow is king. Yeah we should all know this, but if you're working on a cheap-ish offset, you have to worry about how well each stick can breathe. Just laying sticks in the firebox is a bad idea, better if you can put the stick over a heat source with some airflow underneath, meaning laying against the side of the firebox or something. Once I got the first couple sticks going, I'd add a new one by leaning one edge on a lit stick so it was propped up at an angle.
2. If you wait until the temp drops 50 degrees, you might have a hard time getting the next stick going. There was one point where I thought I was going to have to re-light the fire, but it ended up being ok.
3. Charcoal briquettes are a terrible starter. They're the wrong shape and if you lay a stick on a bed of ashed-over charcoal, the stick can't breathe well enough. Wood chunks on the other hand are a fantastic starter and can be lit in a chimney just like charcoal. I had some old pecan chunks I'm not using to cook with, they worked great. A half chimney of flaming wood chunks will get a log lit in no time and they do a great job of getting the cooker heated up.
I have a question about temp control. To keep a clean fire burning, I ended up leaving the firebox door open and the smoke stack wide open. Obviously that leads to fairly big temp swings--when a new stick goes in it spikes up, then slowly comes back down as the stick burns down. Food cooked ok and I was ok with the swings, but is there a way to make it more stable? I decided I didn't want to futz with air control for risk of making a dirty fire, since even with things wide open I sometimes wasn't quite getting TBS. Any tips?
