Beginners Guide To Drum Smokers

welcome smokey ribs i'm russ jones this is episode five in my beginner series and today we're talking about drum smokers all about drum smokers going to show you how to set it up we're going to show you the results of what we're cooking once again this is not about the recipe this is all about the smoker for any of you that are new to drum smokers this will be a good way to kind of get a first hand look at them and how they work this is a gateway drum and there are many makes different people that make these these are actually fabricated this is all brand new material it's not any kind of secondhand drum or anything like that walk around here and i'll show you basically what we got all right now this is a lower vent if you'll follow that pipe down you'll see it going to the bottom of the pit there's another one just like it over here and this is how you dial in your temperatures that's for your intake now this particular one this does not come with this smoker this was an add-on this is to where you can put a fan controller right in here and let the fan control your your pit now up top you got your your top vent so in combination between these two vents and this top vent is how you'll dial dial in your temperatures so a drum smoker they're kind of known for cooking things pretty fast and the reason being they love to hang around 275 to 300 very easily they can't achieve lower temps but they love that 275 300 more of a hot and fast type setup now with this set a lot of people love to take and get their own drum and they buy these aftermarket kits and build these ourselves at a fraction of the cost from what something like this would cost you know buying it straight out from a manufacturer this is a lot of capacity and this is what was left for my last cook all i did was knock the ash out it's got a ash pan right here that makes it very easy just to pull this out you got all your ash there that you can you can clean it out so we're going to be topping this off for today's cook and i don't never worry about getting too many charcoal because as you see when it's all said and done you can shut down your vents and it snuffs out the fire and you have charcoal for the next cup so while i'm right here with it i might as well go ahead and top it off i typically burn lump charcoal knees you can use charcoal briquettes as well now one thing you'll notice about a drum smoker if you ever get one is that you get a lot of mileage out of a basket i have actually filled one of these up before and was able to get three cooks on the same load without ever adding any additional charcoal and uh kind of similar to a kamado really with the efficiency it's really really impressive now i'm gonna go ahead and take this put it right here in the bottom momentarily i'm going to take a couple of fire starters and uh with that said some people put fire starters underneath where the the ash catcher is and they build their fire that way i personally like to put them on top and let it just slowly burn down and out that's why i've always done it and it works very good that way now also you got a thermometer here and i do rely on this quite a bit because once you learn this pit then you know exactly where you're at this dial even if it's all from what you're reading on a digital thermometer you learn to know how it runs at a certain setting so i depend on that quite a bit matter of fact in today's cook i won't even be using an external thermometer a digital thermometer it's just a chicken and i don't probe it usually because it's a kind of a hot and fast cook what i will do is periodically look at it and i'll take an instant read thermometer and just check my internal temp but with that said look right here this is an add-on these normally typically do not come with a probe port i actually drilled this out this little 1 8 inch grommet works perfect you can feed a probe in then feed a second probe in no problem with a very little small hole all right so a while back i purchased this propane torch here this is very long and it reaches all the way down in the bottom of this as you can see right here is ideal for lighting these fire starters so i've got two of the tumbleweeds we're just going to toss them right in the middle [Music] all right so i'm going to take and open these side vents wide open and this one over here it's going to take roughly 10-15 minutes to get this fire established and going good and once we get to that point i'll bring you back and show you what's next so while i'm letting this heat up let me talk about basically how this thing works and what you got is this cylinder shaped barrel which creates a cylindrical type of motion with the air more of a vortex and that creates quite a bit of convection in here and that's why it makes such a good smoker you got good hot air moving over this food in all directions so you get browning on the bottom you get it on the side you get it on top and a lot of people will take and actually hang meat from this and i do have a hanger for this as well i can hang up to 16 racks of ribs with the hanger system now all these are options if you buy one like i did everything you add to this you have to pay for in addition now i think that's why the kits are so popular because you can get it like i said earlier at a fraction of the cost so this is uh looking good maybe about another five minutes so we're gonna go ahead and add some smoke wood to this and we're gonna start adding all the other things into this pit and i'm going to bring you back at that point all right we got it going pretty good so what i've got here is just some small chunks of pecan not a whole lot it's just a single chicken we're just going to lay these around here sporadically put some right in the middle to begin with let those heat up so i laid these sporadically around i've got a few right there on top of the fire they'll light up here momentarily but what i'm going to do now is show you this diffuser plate and where this really shines is if you are using both racks because it helps even out the heat from the top to the bottom it goes in there just like that but i like to use it even with one single grate and that's what we're doing now these are stainless steel grapes so they clean up really nice all right so put my lid on i've got my top vent adjusted about halfway i'm wanting about 325 degrees out of this today so i'm going to crack these open about a quarter of an inch on both sides and we're going to watch our dial when i get in that neighborhood i might have to tweak those a little to achieve at that exact temperature that i'm wanting and once these are dialed in they really hold excellent they hold very well and uh the biggest problem i've noticed with the drum smoker is when you have to remove the lid to check on something it will spike in temperature takes a little while to get back down in the range that you're cooking at but it's never affected any cooks but it does happen every time as long as you keep that lid on there it'll hold right now i'm holding about 250 but we're coming up so i'm gonna go ahead and get this chicken on go ahead and put my lid right here now i've got this on one of these little they call them chicken wrecks and we're going on this chicken i bought this already stuffed with a boudin it's already been seasoned i haven't had to do anything the only thing i might do here in just a little bit is as is cooking is baste it with butter from time to time to kind of get that skin crispy and enhance you know the overall color of it and flavor so we'll be doing that let's put a lid on it for right now who would like to see me debone and stuff my own chicken from scratch show you how to do that like i said this one's store bought piece of cake and you buy it you put it on here in the story i want to do my own i want to show you how to debone the chicken i want to stuff it with like a shrimp and crawfish and jambalaya or something along those lines leave in the comments if you'd like to see that on an upcoming video all right now i have checked on this one time and i basted it with butter that's been probably 20 25 minutes ago let's take a quick look and see how she's looking here all right so i'm going to do a real quick temperature check here just see how we're doing oh yeah that skin's already starting to get a little crisp on it that's what that butter does oh yeah we got a long way to go 75 internal we're wanting to bring this up to 165 internal so we got a little ways to go let's go ahead and baste it with some butter that butter really helps to crisp up the skin plus it gives it a really nice color plus it tastes good now i'm going to periodically come back in here and do this every time i check on it looks good try not to keep this open no more than you have to let's take a look i have a feeling we're real close all right let's take an internal temperature on this and see what we're looking like i'm at 172. that's at 191 oh yeah we're done man that is super tender all right i don't want to poke a bunch of holes in it look at that that just looks fantastic by the way this is the boudin and it's stuffed all the way in this the entire carcass has been removed so that's nothing but meat skin and boudin in there now they did leave the bones in the wings but not in the legs all right we're getting ready to pull this off for here all right we have been resting about 10 minutes so we're going to go ahead and cut into this bad boy i know it's still piping hot but we should be good like i said earl that is the actual stuffing that where it's coming out at the end of the cavity oh man look how tender this is [Music] look at that oh my goodness that just looks incredible all right i'm just going to take my fingers here and try a little bit of this oh that's got a really good seasoning perfect amount of smoke i mean it's just ideal the crispy on the skin is you can almost hear that it's got a nice crispy skin that's from the butter we added but hey there again this is not about this cook even though i'm really pleased with it it's all about this smoker and you can see the fantastic results that you get from a drum smoker i highly recommend if you're really into smoking meats you need a drum smoker sometimes they're referred to as an ugly drum smoker look in the kits looking to buy one look into whatever you want to do you know you can save some money by doing it yourself plus it's it's a fun thing to do i purchased this one because it was ready to go i bought the accessories for it and things like we talked about earlier but you're gonna love the results on this and cooking time what does this take about two and a half hours y'all think something like that which is about average for a chicken i have you know spent as long as three hours on them so they do cook a little hotter but they're completely adjustable with the lower vents in the upper vents just like any other smoker we've talked about this on previous videos you've got that ventilation and that's how you dial in your temps it just transfers transfers from one smoker to the next now next week we're going to roll out the offset i'm going to show you fire management on offset and we'll have some sort of protein going on that as well i hope you all enjoyed this video i hope you got something from it until next time smokey ribs you

Channel: Smoky Ribs BBQ

Views: 124,140

Keywords: beginners guide to drum smoker, drum smoker, ugly drum smoker, drum smokers, barrel smoker, fire management, drum smoker reviews, fire management smoker, barrel smoker chicken, ugly drum smoker cooking, ugly drum smoker temperature control, drum smoker fire management, drum smoker vs kamado, gateway drum smokers, best drum smokers, cooking channels for beginners, boneless stuffed chicken recipes, boneless stuffed chicken roast, smoky ribs bbq, smokey ribs bbq

Id: no7WbpkrgWA

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021