Barbecue smoking is the art of cooking meat low and slow using hot smoke produced by burning wood, charcoal, or specially designed wood pellets. For the purist the word barbecue automatically defines cooking with hot smoke, but the word is oftentimes confused with cooking over an open flame on a grill. For the real BBQ aficionado, cooking on a grill over an open flame is called grilling, whereas cooking with hot smoke is simply called barbecue. There are three main types of BBQ smokers.
Water BBQ Smoker
The most popular and not coincidentally the least expensive type of smoker is the vertical water smoker. The most popular brands of vertical water smoker at this time are the Gourmet Smoker & Grill made by The Brinkman Corporation and the Smokey Mountain BBQ Cooker made by the most famous name in home BBQ, Weber. These units come in various sizes and range from $90 to $500. Remember when you buy a smoker, size does matter, because smoking takes hours and therefore you have to cook all of the meat for everyone at your meal at the same time, this is in juxtaposition to grilling where you are constantly able to add new food to the grill as you serve the cooked food and the therefore the single grill can be used to cook more food than it can hold at a single time.
The Water Smoker is oftentimes referred to as the vertical smoker, this is because it is configured vertically. At the bottom of the unit is a place where heat is made. Different smokers use different methods of creating heat. These methods include fire from wood, fire from charcoal, and heat from electric heating elements.
Above the area of fire or heat is a pan of water. The water pan can be filled simply with water, or it can be filled with water that has flavoring oils or other flavoring elements added. The water pan is used for two reasons. The first is that it collects the heat from below it and distributes that heat across the entire water pan before allowing the heat to rise to the area above it were the meat is held. The second is that the water also serves as the method by which steam, or smoke, is formed. As the heat from below gets hot enough and distributed across the water pan the water begins to steam. This evenly distributed, hot, steam then moves upward to the compartment above where the meat is held.
Above the water pan the meat is held on several different types of surfaces. It may be a grill, a flat cooking surface, or even a rotisserie. The smoke rises to fill and heat the cooking chamber with hot steam. The hot steam then cooks the meat “low and slow” just the way a BBQ should. The steam itself, being a derivative of water, helps the meat stay moist and if the water pan contains flavoring oils then the meat will be infused with the steam filled flavor.
Offset BBQ Smoker
This smoker is a smoker that has two distinct chambers that are “offset” in a horizontal arrangement. The smoking chamber actually resembles a traditional BBQ grill with a long horizontal area where the meat is held. This horizontal area may hold the meat on a cooking surface, like a cookie sheet or broiling pan, a grill, or a rotisserie. This chamber of course has a lid that closes down and over the entire smoking chamber in order to capture the heated smoke in order to cook the meat.
The least expensive offset BBQ smokers will cost over $150 and the most expensive can go into the multiple thousands depending on the size you want to purchase. Offset smokers can get as large as you like, even exceeding 10 to 20 feet long. As mentioned earlier the size of the smoker is dependent upon the amount of meat you need to serve at a given time. Because smoking takes several hours all the meat for an occasion needs to be cooked at the same time. Unlike BBQ grilling where you can constantly and quickly grill food, remove it, and replace that area on the grill with more food and constantly repeat the process until everyone at the BBQ is fed.
To the side of the traditional looking chamber is another chamber. This chamber is the firebox. The firebox itself is accessible through a side door and has adjustable ventilation controls to control the temperature and amount of heated smoke that enters into the smoking chamber. To use the firebox you put into it wood or charcoal that is set on fire. The resulting smoke from the fire then enters into the smoking chamber via the adjustable vents, and of course this heated smoke then cooks the meat.
The offset smoker is the smoker you most often see in BBQ competitions. These two chamber smokers are built in dozens of different ways by mass production companies and custom built manufacturers. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of “secrets” to making the best offset smoker and of course each maker, especially the custom makers, believes they have the special insight and method to make the best and most effective BBQ.
Box BBQ Smokers
As with any popular past time, there are as many configurations of smokers as there are aficionados of BBQ that feel they know the secret of how to make the best BBQ. The Cookshack box smoker designed by Fast Eddy, a well known figure in competition BBQ, is specially designed by Fast Eddy not as much for competition but for homeowners that want an alternative to the vertical smoker but with authentic results similar to the offset smoker.
These units look more like solid metal refrigerators than like traditional smokers or grills. The door is opened, the meat is placed on racks and the door is shut and sealed. Below the “box” where the meat is kept the fire is set. Of course smoke is let into the box chamber through a vent system and thus cooks the meat. These units are compact, easy to use, and less expensive than an offset grill. They are also able to cook more meat, given the space they take, by using the system of racks inside of a box system which looks similar to the way food is placed inside of a refrigerator.
Nowadays there are several designs of box smokers, some heat from the bottom and others from a firebox on the side that looks like a small box attached to the side of the larger box that contains the meat. When buying a box smoker you need to ensure that the smoker is well made and well insulated. Make certain the unit is made from quality heavy duty materials. If it is not made to a high quality standard it will not work very well and you are better off buying a vertical water smoker.
It does not matter if you desire the inexpensive simplicity of the vertical water smoker, the authenticity of the offset smoker, or the utility of the box smoker, the most important thing is that you purchase a smoker that you will use. Never purchase beyond your interest in learning to smoke meat. Purchase a unit that you know will interest you and that you will use regularly. If you want easy because you like smoked meat and are not interested in the art of BBQ, then get a simple unit that has automated controls. If on the other hand that is too boring for you and you will only BBQ if it takes skill and effort, then get an authentic offset unit that will spark your interest. The box units are simply utilitarian vertical smokers, they are a little more difficult than the water smoker, but they produce more authentic results and much more quantity of meat per smoking because of the utility of the box design. In the end, when looking at the field of available BBQ smokers, choose the unit you are most likely to use and enjoy the most.
