How to Season A Raw Steel Offset Smoker The RIGHT Way | Tips & Tricks Everyone Misses

hey I'm James from soaking dad BBQ and today I am sharing my best practices for getting a great seasoning on your offset smoker and if you're in a Northern climate like me with the winter months just around the corner now is the perfect time to put this on your weekend to-do list like many of you when I picked up my first Offset Smoker a couple years ago I relied on the advice of some of the most popular videos on YouTube only to find out there are a couple flaws with that method that just weren't giving me a result that was protecting my Offset Smoker from rust and led to a couple of extra issues so with a couple years under the belt I want to share some of the tweaks and the method and technique that I've developed for getting a great seasoning on my newer offset smokers so you can avoid some of the same mistakes that maybe I fell into without further Ado let's get started so one of the biggest issues that I see is oil selection and this is not necessarily a bad thing because an oil on your Firebox with a high smoke point around 450 degrees or higher something like avocado oil or even canola oil is a popular one and used in products like Pam this can work great on your Firebox but it just doesn't get hot enough in other parts of our offset in order to polymerize that oil into a great finish and this can lead to a couple problems notably that we have sticky metal that does not have a protective coating on it so over the winter months this can rust or sticky surfaces can cause other problems they tend to be a magnet for things like dust in the backyard so you get maybe bubbling on your surface which can flake off which only leads to exasperate the problem once we start dealing with rain snow and the cold weather wanting to accelerate the development of rust on our offset let me demonstrate what a great non-stick surface looks like and what we are trying to develop with proper technique of polymerizing oils on our offset so since I have two offsets I wanted to demonstrate a good seasoning versus a less than ideal seasoning so on our good seasoning which you can see here on my smoke North Echo reverse flow there is no discoloration where we are getting a bit of a cure polymerization going on on one side and then working our way back all the way to something that looks like raw steel on the other side it is completely uniform in color but more importantly than the color it's what you can feel here when we touch the offset this feels just like a cast iron pan that has been properly seasoned you'd be using in your indoor oven and it is smooth as glass all the way around yesterday to get ready for today's video I did some of the things that I did early on following that popular device and I sprayed a higher smoke point oil all over my Huron Gen 2 and what that started to do you can see here where we're not getting proper polymerization this is because we have too much oil when you're just spraying too much oil aggressively as well as not getting a hot enough temperature to reach the smoke point where that is starting to polymerize and because of that this is completely sticky it feels almost like a fly trap in terms of how tacky the outside surface is and like a fly trap everything that's outside is starting to stick to it so whatever this is hair dust this has only been 24 hours this debris is completely attaching itself to the offset and even as I'm rubbing it not wanting to come off this is just that sticky so if this is what we don't want let me show you the technique and the method to get the type of seasoning finish that we do want so while cooking with wood I like to cook with wood where we want to get something like a hot fire really quick accelerating our coal bed is going to save us some time and money charcoal is less expensive than properly seasoned hardwood so I'm going to add just a little bit of Fogo to the bottom to give us a base layer of cools to help accelerate our polymerization process like all my fires I like to start with kiln-dried this is Kiln ride grocery store Birch wood so birch wood is a hardwood but the fact that it's Kiln dried means it's going to be like paper and ignite very quickly which is just going to save us some time as well as help heat soak our pit something that is really important for getting a good polymerization is properly heat soaking about 900 pounds of raw steel so let's grab our grow Blazer grow gun and fire it up good looks good foreign so while we're waiting for our pit to build up some temperature so we can start the seasoning process let me share a couple other best practices normally I'd be done with something like my grow Blazer Grill gun at this point and be putting it away but we're actually going to use this for another step no matter how hot I get my offset I never get enough temperature down the support legs or near the wheels to build a protective seasoning and this is one of the number one areas prone to rust and so what we're going to do is apply a little bit of oil and then use our torch to Target blast sear and get that metal up beyond the temperature needed for properly polymerizing the oil so as you can see here we continue to build on a great protective coat all over our offset my next two tips are ambient temperature and location these will make a big difference now with something like my thick raw steel so we're a half inch and all places are up to three quarters of an inch or in some areas of our Firebox I can get enough Heat built into this even in the coldest of winter months but just like in your oven you get the best result seasoning cast iron where you bring it up to a temperature let it sit there for an hour and then turn the oven off and leave it there all day and this slow cooling off process tends to give me the absolute best result and I find even though I can season my offset in the winter months I get a much better polymerization effect doing it in warmer temperatures of 70 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer the part two of that or for my third tip is the time of day and or the location and so where I am is you can start to see on my here on Gen 2 behind me the sun is just starting to work its way around the corner so I'm starting this at a time of day where we are going to get a little extra help of some direct sunlight when we're at our warmest temperatures and this is just going to help accelerate the process of polymerizing the oils all over our pit as it is baking in the hot sun it'll just make it much much easier so let's give this a couple more minutes I'll grab an eye air gun and show you our Target temperatures and once we reach a warming up temperature to polymerize those oils I'll walk you through oil selection for different locations on your offset the techniques that I use for applying the oil to get the absolute best results and everything else you need to know to get your offset ready for the winter months so our pit is nearly up to temperature but while we're waiting let me cover a couple other tools that come in really handy when building a great seasoning I already covered something like my grow Blazer go gun this will help get those hard to reach places where we don't build enough Heat next is something like an infrared gun so this is a thermoworks iron gun I also if I have it out here which of course I don't but is my thermapen with a built-in IR temperature reader either one of these will work equally well especially for the temperatures that we're going to be looking for today which is below 600 degrees Fahrenheit which is the maximum of the IR gun and why you might need to step up to something like this which I use in my pizza oven where we're getting much much higher temperatures but this will help make sure that we're at the price proper temperature before applying our oil next is instead of paper towel I like to use these shop towels to Home Depot and many other places sell these but these are low end lint and this is not going to help get white fluff as the paper towel starts to tear and actually build that into our seasoning it's one of those small little details if you don't think about the first time you do it and then the next day you go to check your work and you've got a gritty sort of white fluff finish baked into your offset so going with a towel like this or even better a microfiber cloth if you have a couple of those that you don't mind destroying in the process those will work as well also handy on the list is some high heat gloves I regularly use for handling food something like cotton oven gloves with some nitrile protection this does not offer enough protection for handling a hot paper towel and having oil on it and touching offset and that will come through once the heat comes through the glove it will absolutely burn you so I recommend getting a pair of high heat gloves that are rated to 700 degrees Fahrenheit or higher like these ones so next is oil selection so this is about having the right tool for the job so on our Firebox we can get away with almost any high heat oil whether you had avocado oil or grape seed oil or even what I'm going to use here today a canola spray which is about 450 degrees Fahrenheit in terms of its polymerization this is going to help stand up to abuse in our Firebox if I were to go with my flaxseed oil option on the Firebox running a high heat fire even like what we're going to do today for seasoning will destroy that seasoning and break it down to the point where we're back to raw steel so this is not the right selection for our Firebox but equally true this is not the right selection for everything else on our offset so I like a spray you could use Pam canola oil or anything like that around the 400 to 500 degree smoke temperature range this will work really really well in terms of our oil and applying it you have a couple options you can get one of your Rags or your cloths damp and use an application in a bowl and start to apply that this is not my favorite way of doing it because what tends to happen is you get drips and those drips are running down particularly like me if you're on a patio those are going to stain your stones or if you're trying to cover a large area it'll be on too thick and you don't have time to come back and wipe that down thin the proper amount of oil is almost invisible to the point where I'm not sure I covered this area that is the perfect amount of oil you don't need to see a pool of oil in order to get a great seasoning in fact the opposite is true you get the best results when it's barely visible to the naked eye and so by going with something like a spray bottle even those doesn't spray perfectly I've tried a couple of those different oil misters and by the time you get the pump action going and they clog up and they don't work it's just more frustrating particularly when you're dealing with hot high heat gloves or a hot offset so even though this won't spray per perfectly a cheap Dollar Store spray bottle will do the trick where you can spray and then immediately wipe to it's almost the point you can't tell it's there so these are the tools that we need to pull off the perfect seasoning let's go check our temperatures with the IR gun and see if it is ready to move into our seasoning phase so we are not quite there I can still touch the door and we're just about to 300 degrees Fahrenheit normally you would need to be in around the 400 to maybe 450 degrees Fahrenheit temperature so let me show you with the IR gun so we're getting a temperature on our door of 152 degrees Fahrenheit the end here of our cook chamber a little bit closer 203 degrees Fahrenheit and along the top where it will be the hottest once it is fully heat soaking so you can see that 175 degrees Fahrenheit and our smokestack which would be the coolest working its way all the way down near the top to 140 degrees Fahrenheit so we are not hot enough but we can actually help things along by coming over to our smokestack and adjusting our damper instead of being wide open to start to build some of that heat so let's go do that now so right now all the heat is leaving our offset which is just going to cause us to burn through more wood so let's close this to about the 20 close so 80 open which will help make sure that we're still burning a nice wide open fire but chop a little bit more heat so I'll come back in another 10 minutes and see where we're at so while we're waiting for our chamber to reach temperature we can also take the time now to get started on our legs and even though we're nearly there on our chamber there's next to no heat near the bottom of the legs even though up near the top of the chamber I can definitely feel a little bit of warmth but that's not going to be enough to season anything uh from kind of the halfway point down so the first thing I want to do is get some tin foil and since I'm going to be using my grill gun to get a little bit of heat onto this lower section I do not want to be hitting my wheels as they are rubber and we're or the mechanism so I'm just going to put a little bit of protection around the bottom part of our wheel assembly well tin foil will not give me much protection it'll give me the chance to apply my torch and do a couple passes without doing any damage to everything down below so next I'm going to use an application a towel to get the oil on here it's a little bit more accurate for working around the wheels than something like spray especially if you don't want to get that oil onto your patio stones so now I'm just going to apply some oil on all the exposed raw metal surfaces that tin foil will also help catch anything I'm a little too aggressive on and then using the non heavily oiled side I'm going to wipe off almost as much of that oil that I could see that I just put on and that is going to be the perfect amount next we'll grab our torch I'm using a girl Blazer Grill gun and again we only need to get the oil to a temperature of about 250 degrees Fahrenheit so we do not need to blast this for a long time just a quick little blast [Music] remove our foil and this leg's done I'll do the exact same thing on all four other legs and then I'll meet you over by our cook chamber for our actual seasoning okay right on time we're now up to 400 Degrees which I think should be getting us pretty close so we're up to about 220 degrees on our door which will be the coolest we are over the part that we need for polymerization everywhere else I'm not saying anywhere else below 259 degrees Fahrenheit so by the time we get the oil on this will continue to build up temperature and be exactly where we need it got our high heat gloves our towel as well as our flaxseed oil this is why I like the sprayer even though it doesn't spray very well is we're going to quickly blast this with a little bit of oil and then try and wipe off near all of it before it starts to polymerize little spray and like I said wipe off right away this top six or eight inches is done do the lower part of our door okay that looks good let's do the inner part of our door where we've got a bit of overlap right along the edges because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there that is perfect so let's close that back up next we can do our Dome cap so let's get ready to do the back side of our offset but at this point I want to change out towels this is starting to absorb too much oil where it's not going to remove enough and that will start to give us a bit of a spotty finish spray along this wiping very quickly is what helps get this nice smooth Finish versus letting it start to burn and that's where we're going to get a bit of a textured tacky sticky finish that I personally don't like next we'll do our collector and our chimney before moving on to our Firebox where we're going to change oils spray just a little bit of oil onto my towel in order to do my chimney stack here so last but not least is our Firebox now I'm okay to do my flat top here since this is exactly the temperature range that I want around 430 degrees Fahrenheit so this part is okay what's actually too hot is our Firebox so if I were to get a temperature on that this is just going to burn the oil so I'm going to spray it on show you what that looks like but I actually build seasoning on my Firebox during cooking as any normal cook this is going to be hot enough to do our Firebox whereas I need this high temperature for my flat top so I'll show you what it looks like but just know that this is going to burn down here because we're a little bit too hot as it is spray that on you can see soon as we hit off of my flat top it is burning and as quickly as I can switch hands I want to wipe that off so quick recap not one size fits all in terms of oil make sure we're using the right oil for the right part of our offset I like to get organic Flax on my cook chamber and something like canola on my Firebox second is quantity so make sure that we are just not over spraying this and letting it bake that will work but you're going to get drips as well as a non-smooth sort of sticky tacky texture that will just lend itself to the environment adhering to your offset that just happens to be a recipe for rust particularly in the colder months and I find I mentioned earlier I've already done two coats on my echo reverse flow this is now my third coat this should be enough in order to take me into the winter months I do have a cover which will help extend my period of protection but even with the cover snow and sleet and Ice everything likes to find its way into those little nooks and crannies so three applications should be enough to keep me seasoned and rust free all winter at this point anything else that I would add is just for personal preferences on color if you want we're already losing a bit of that raw metal look and starting to get to that dark painted black look that something like my cheap Offset Smoker my Oklahoma Joe's comes painted it looked great the day that it's new and after a couple uses it quickly looks old whereas a raw steel offset looks like a raw steel offset day one and if you want to get it black that can only be achieved over building multiple layers of seasoning you're probably going to be about five to seven applications all in to start to get as black as something like my Huron Gen 2 behind me if there's anything that I didn't cover you have a question let me know down in the comments I do my best to check those out and or join me on a monthly members live where we can interact in a bit of a real-time basis versus these pre-recorded videos and answer any questions that might be on your mind that's it for today though I'm James from that barbecue signing off and remember don't be afraid to fire it up even if it is just for seasoning your offset see you next time

Channel: Smoking Dad BBQ

Views: 13,118

Keywords: how to season your offset smoker, seasoning a smoker, season smoker, offset smoker, smoker seasoning, how to season your smoker, how to season an offset smoker, how to season smoker, stick burner, offset smoker tips, season offset smoker firebox, firebox seasoning, cook chamber seasoning, raw steel seasoning, lineseed oil, canola oil, pam, rust prevention, offset smoker rust, protect offset smoker, seasoning offset, season raw steel offset, smoke north offset, how to

Id: 2B1WexzHFWU

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023