How to Run a 500-Gallon Offset Smoker

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to answer a question that i've gotten about a million times where people ask how do i run a 500 gallon offset smoker well today i'm going to show you exactly how first of all i want to thank skillshare for sponsoring this video skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes that give you the opportunity to learn something you've always wanted to learn for me i love learning but i love learning the things that i care about so i was never super enthused in school when i had to learn about boring stuff or things that i perceived to be boring because it just didn't capture my interest with skillshare you can choose the classes that capture your interest and develop skills that you've been wanting to develop for a long time for me i'm trying to develop new skills right now and also on skillshare i'm taking iphone filmmaking by caleb babcock and niles gray because i'm going to be going hunting that's the skill i'm learning right behind me and i need to be able to film it and i'm going to be doing it with just my phone because carrying a bunch of heavy camera equipment into the mountains is not going to be the easiest thing in the whole world so it offers me an opportunity to learn how to film and make quality video with just a phone now for the first thousand of my viewers who click on the link below you'll get a free trial of skillshare and you have access to a bunch of classes i mean on various topics and the possibilities for what you can learn are almost endless so if nothing else take advantage of that trial and go learn something try out the classes i think you're going to be hooked especially if you're somebody who's watching my channel where i'm teaching about barbecue you're probably the kind of people who are going to enjoy what is offered on skillshare's platform now let's get into the video step one and it's very important you get started early because it always takes longer than you would think but step one is get the fire started so what we're doing with the wood is we're making kind of a lattice structure and when you do that you're giving the fire a place to climb up and so you're going to have a better fire faster and so each wood should have a small separation between the next piece of wood so you don't want them touching side to side and you don't want you know big gaps either but you want the fire to be able to go through that gap and light both pieces of wood at the same time so you can use a number of different options you can use a propane torch that's what i usually do you can use used butcher paper you can use tumbleweeds you can use those little white blocks that people use to start fires whatever you want to do is going to be fine i recommend using the torch or the butcher paper whatever it is it's going to be easy get started early and get your fire going well because the whole cook is going to be dependent on that fire and the last thing about the fire that we start off with is i want to build a really big fire to start off with because i want a good coal bed from the very beginning so if you make a small fire and you're slowly adding wood to it it's going to take a while to build up a really good coal bed which is going to power the entire cook so if you make a big fire right from the beginning you're going to have a coal bed right away and i'll also show you what i do to season the firebox every time and that's easier with a big fire mm-hmm [Music] i look so much cleaner after i cleaned it yesterday like the bottom looks like completely fresh metal with just a little bit of oil on it all right first i have to confess that i missed the shot when the initial pile of wood burned down to coals so my wife who does all the filming was not available she was feeding our daughter which means she wasn't here to take the camera shot so i just had to add wood because the show must go on so what we have now is another fire that is burned down to coals pretty much and so this looks pretty much identical to what you would see after the initial fire burns down the coals you might have one log that's still on fire but then mostly coals so what i want to do is show you exactly what that looks like we'll put it here and then i'm going to show you exactly how to deal with it how to build a fire up from it so that you get great quality smoke and the fire is healthy it's not choked off everything is built the proper way so you get the best quality smoke the most efficient fire and again it's all about the barbecue at the end to get the best barbecue you can get right and if i were to put one more piece on i'd put it on like this so usually i go three and three you know in perpendicular directions but you see when you set it up that way everything immediately catches flame especially if you're preheating the wood and you get great quality smoke immediately there's no period of bad smoke no period where you're not burning an efficient fire right away you're doing exactly what you want to do all right now that we got our fire going what i do is i take some cooking spray this is just general maintenance and i spray any parts where it looks like that coating of previous layers of cooking oil is starting to break down a little bit in my case it's usually on the top so i just do this and i want all this bad smell and gross stuff to happen before i actually put the meat in the smoker now we're waiting for that oil to set and polymerize and kind of form a protective coating on the firebox i do it every time just because i want to protect that metal because that metal is how i'm able to use this thing and how it cooks now you may be wondering why i do things in the order that i do them it's because i want everything to finish at the exact same time so i start the fire first once the fire gets going really well then i spray with oil once the fire burns down the coals and the oil is set and then the meat is prepped all those things tend to line up at about the same time give or take five minutes so i've been in this situation before where i would do them in a different order i'd like the fire and then i would prep the meat and then i'd try to coat it in oil then i'd have to wait with prepped meat and a good fire to put the meat on and it just didn't work out it wasn't the most ideal circumstance to get your food on the cooker and get it cooking so light the fire spray with oil prep the meat and then once you're done prepping the meat you're probably going to be ready to start cooking all right now one thing we have to do in any barbecue video is cook meat so we are going to use these beef ribs and the reason we have to cook meat to make this video make sense is because a lot of the decisions i make when managing the fire and just kind of generally running the smoker is going to be based on what's happening to the meat so if the meat is starting to burn i'm going to run the fire a little bit differently i'm going to change how i do the door i'm going to change potentially even the full open on the stack you know i'm going to add wood or i'm going to add less wood it just depends on the situation so this is what we're going to use is our test case to show you exactly what i'm thinking about when i run this 500 gallon pit so first let's get these out of the package all right got this unpackaged and you may be asking why am i doing beef ribs because beef ribs are far and away my favorite barbecue item if you've never cooked three bone beef ribs you're really missing out and um i'm gonna answer a question that people ask me all the time anytime beef ribs show up in any of my videos people ask me hey where'd you get those beefers where did you get those beef where did you get those beef roots even my brother called me last night and said hey where do you get those three bone beef ribs and my answer has always been well you know i have a meat supplier so i just call the meat supplier say you know i need 200 pounds of brisket and 100 pounds of pork butts or whatever and it will show up it's like i need an asian style duck and it shows up now most of you aren't going to have an account with a commercial meat supplier like i do so you're not going to be able to order them the same way i do so i looked online and the very best place i found was called stutzman brothers meats that's where i got these guys they were on sale and they look incredible in all honesty probably the best looking rack of beef ribs i've ever seen and i've cooked a lot of cooked wagyu beef ribs a bunch of stuff in the past these look crazy good they look so good that it's almost impossible to mess them up so if you have the time and you have the money get some of these and everybody's gonna think even if you're an idiot about barbecue they're gonna think you're aaron franklin because beef ribs are the king of barbecue one disclaimer i'm not getting paid to say this i'm not making any money on this or anything like that it's just i found these and they look incredible online and they're cut exactly the way i want so it's bone meat and yeah this is really good stuff i know this isn't a beef rib cooking video but man don't those look good let's get them up all right first i want to apologize for the mower sound in the background but i want to show you this at the right time which is now so after i've lit the fire after i have covered the smoker in oil the firebox actually and after that's kind of set and burned in then i start lining up the wood that i'm going to use on top of the firebox to start drying it out so this wood is a little greener than what i'm used to using so i want to make sure it's nice and dry and preheated so that when i put it on the fire automatically it sparks up it takes the flame and produces good quality smoke that i want to use in the end so if your what is very dry this isn't necessary but for most people probably across the country this is a good step to ensure you burn a clean fire every time next thing fill up your water pans so where i was in la it was very very very dry and so water pans were absolutely crucial here they're important but not as crucial as they were in los angeles where you know the relative humidity was you know single digits a lot of times but i put these water pans in i fill them up usually before i actually even light the fire today i did it after it's not a huge deal either way but what you wanted to do is work as a heat sink absorbing a lot of the heat that comes right out of the firebox and then also contributing moisture to the cook chamber so make sure you do that when you're running a big pit so i've been running this pit at 275 that's what i cook everything at it just seems to be the best temperature to get the kind of quality results that i want in the end and so the way i measure it i don't measure it at the firebox end because that would be way hotter than 275 325 335 you know it just when it comes out kind of nuclear hot that's not the temperature that you're really going to get on the meat so brisket weather is in this is in this probably three quarters of the smoker and you cook brisket in any of these parts but basically what i do is i don't let this top gauge get higher than 300 or this bottom gauge get lower than 250 and most of the time they both stay pretty close to 275 this bottom one is usually 265 this top one is usually 285 and that's how i rock the whole cook as much as i possibly can so what i do is when the temperature starts to drop i'll add a log before it gets lower than what i want because what happens is the temperature is going down i add a log and then it starts to come back up it's not an instantaneous thing especially on a big smoker like this and so in a lot of ways 500 gallon pits are the ideal size smoker because they respond relatively quickly and they have the results of a big size offset but they're not as unwieldy as a thousand gallon both in terms of size and in response to how you manage the fire anyway let's take a look at this meat because i want to talk about the meat and what that tells me about how i'm managing the fire so if you look at these beef ribs they have a nice deep dark red color and nothing is burning that tells me everything is good if i saw some singing some kind of burning on this edge that's closest to the firebox that tell me okay well i have to first of all rotate that beef rib and then second of all dial it down so maybe that means i cook at 250 and 275 on those two middle gauges maybe i have to just coax it along and let it happen on its own not really try to force it but this is exactly what i want also if i wasn't seeing any pullback on these bones that would tell me well i'm not cooking hot enough so if you know the meat was extending all the way out to the bones then i'd say i got to dial it up maybe no lower than 275 no higher than 325. so i'm doing that based on what the meat looks like not really on the temperature necessarily itself that's the guideline but then i'll adjust it based on what i'm seeing with the meat so if i look at this one right now i see that there's some pull back from the bone but i want more so i'm going to dial up the temperature a little bit which means i add more wood and then we're going to take a look at the firebox and see how i add the wood so that it burns cleanly and effectively so i get the flavor i want i get the temperature i want and ultimately i get the barbecue i want right now it's time to spray part of me is telling me that i'm giving away all of my trade secrets and then part of me tells me that if i were somebody watching videos on youtube i would want somebody to tell me the truth and so that's exactly what i'm telling you right now so this is how i spray stuff on my 500 gallon pit i don't use those little spray bottles because they break and then i've gone through i don't know probably a hundred of those by now what i do is i get a pesticide sprayer fill it with half apple cider vinegar and half water and then i spray the meat and this is just by far the easiest way it can hold a gallon at a time you can get the ones that are two gallons basically you only have to fill this thing up once for an entire cook even if i'm cooking 25 briskets so this is the easiest way to spray the briskets or in this case the beef ribs even though i got a brisket on here and some pork butts and then some other beef ribs i'm going to show you at the end to kind of try to illustrate the difference between the three bone beef ribs and then the four bone beef ribs it's not even in the same universe but i want to show you just to prove it okay when i spray spray the meat not the fat but if you get some on the fat it's okay so super easy i'm gonna press this trigger and everything will get sprayed watch and it's that easy all right so i want to make you aware of two things number one is i took out this top rack number two is i want to kind of clue you into the things that i'm looking for when i'm doing cook so all the things in the back here look great but these four born short ribs they're cooking a little faster than i want especially the one in the middle so let's take a look at each of those and then what that tells me about the fire and their placement in the smoker so i pulled these out and looked at them and they're not burned or anything they're actually looking really good but they're just further along than everything else that i'm cooking so that means i don't need to change the fire everything is totally fine but because they're further along i want to move them back because everything else looks great the brisket looks great the pork butts look great the three bone beef ribs look great it's just these are a little too far along i want them to finish at the same time so what i'm going to do is move them further back so that they finish at the same time and get wrapped at the same time as everything else so take this one and the other four bone short rib and move it a little bit back in case you're confused about what i mean by back back beans further away from the firebox toward the smokestack side all right for any of you who don't know the side of the beef rib that's facing the fire at least in an offset smoker is the one that has the greater pullback so that's the pullback from one side this is the pullback from the other this side was definitely facing the fire so if you're ever going to get a beef rib and only one side is sucked up all the way that tells you that that side was facing the fire the whole time if they're kind of equal then they probably got switched around there's not right or wrong either way it's just something that can kind of clue you into how that thing was cooked right so i'm going to move this four bone short rib and the other one from here back to here just so they kind of hang out and just kind of slow down and catch up to everything else here's this one it looks pretty good but again just a little bit further along again this side was facing the fire that's how much bone is exposed this side was not facing the fire not much bone exposed so for your information all right it's the next day and we had some issues with uh mike but we got them resolved now and we're gonna insert some footage of the meat here and so this is exactly what i want to see so it's getting a nice dark bark nothing is burning the fat is rendering well and that's the simple process that i use to run the 500 gallon smoker now it may be frustrating to you that running a 500 gallon pit is easier than running a backyard offset smoker that's just the way it is so if you get one of these your fire management is going to be a lot easier because that coal bed is so extremely hot that it just eats all the wood that goes in there you don't have to you know have a lot of nuance in what you do but as long as you follow the same basic process make the lattice structure you're going to have a clean fire pretty much every time there are some exceptional circumstances where you have wind or rain that are going to make things more difficult but usually you're going to be just cruising along now i just add more wood if i want the temperature to go up because i'm not getting the fat render that i want and i add less wood if it's getting a little too hot and you start to see some bubbling and some you know pre-burn marks on the meat itself so very simple very straightforward follow the rules and you're going to be successful so this was just a nuts and bolts exactly what i do to run the smoker if you want to know what i'm thinking about when i'm running the smoker you can check out my ultimate guide to fire management video i'll put a link in the description that explains everything that goes into the process of how i think about managing the fire and how to manage the fire in a 500 or a backyard smoker it's all the reasoning behind why i do what i do this video is just what i do and if you want to know more about that click on that video it's a pretty comprehensive video about as comprehensive as i could make it but i hope you guys watch it and i hope you enjoy it now running a 500 gallon smoker is kind of fun in and of itself but it's all about the meat and so no barbecue video is totally complete without cooking some meat and showing what it looks like in the end so we're going to head inside cut open those beef ribs and take a look [Music] thank you for watching matt scientist barbecue if you enjoyed the video hit the like button down below subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on so you get notified every time i make a new video you can also follow me on instagram and twitter at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to show you now i got to try one more take to make a big fire right from the i'm sorry i really have to poop okay ready okay ready yeah okay fill them the way i do okay most of you out there do not okay all right okay now i know this isn't a beef rib cooking bit no no let me try it again let me try it again so i'm doing that based on the okay that if i were watching this vid channel hold on and the brisket that's in there and the pork butt let me try again it's exactly the okay

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 203,768

Rating: 4.901 out of 5

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Id: 6vozXMm_jTA

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020