Oklahoma Joe Highland Smoker Real Life Review

[Music] good afternoon you too this is real-life reviews today we're going to be reviewing the oklahoma joe offset highland smoker let's review it so a little background about Oklahoma Joe is that it started off with three guys in a garage in Oklahoma and that all they did was build these custom made smokers and turns out they were so good at it they caught the eye of a much larger brand called char-broil and that company bought them out and I thought that when this took place that we would start losing some of the key features in the Oklahoma Joe and then it would be more truer to the char-broil name but that's absolutely not the case this is coming from a guy who had a job before the Charbroil transition and now I have the new one after the char-broil buyout I haven't noticed any changes at all it far exceeds the expectations of the char-broil name so even though it's still advertised as Oklahoma Joe just know that the parent company is char-broil and that's probably a name you're more familiar with let's dive right into the grill so this particular grill has two ways that you can cook on it you can either sear a grill steak beef whatever or you could slow smoke so the last review I did last week of the Dyna Glo smoker is that it was advertised and it boasted it had two different ways of cooking you could either grill or smoke that turned out absolutely not to be the truth this smoker never advertises to be a grill that I guarantee you you can cook a fine steak or what lamb duck chicken whatever you want to grill with no problems at all the last thing I want to talk about as far as the cooking surface is concerned is that the grates that come with this grill or porcelain but let me tell you I had my other grill for six years and I still have those Grace and I cooked and smoked on that thing just about weekly and I really had some hot fires any time you're trying to sear a tomahawk steak it's 600 degrees those rates go through a tremendous amount of stress and they are still like they were day one they still clean up just like they did porcelain is the way to go and Oklahoma Joe did an excellent job providing two sets of porcelain grapes so as far as smokers are concerned size does matter this smoker came in at a whopping 200 pounds now I did make some mods because I'm familiar with this grill I'm go ahead and make a few months and we're going to talk about that a little bit but as far as the size of the weight of the construction very heavy robust grill so the last thing in the description of what I talked about is the size of the firebox so the firebox is deep in this case you can have a multiple hour 16 hour burn inside this firebox without having to dump any ashes some of the competitors out there you can only burn three to four hours and then you're already you're pulling hot ash out in order to make room for more ash and to me that's dangerous it's not effective it takes away from your cook you're losing a lot of heat and you're having to start your fire over every time it's just not a good idea but in this case the firebox is big it can hold a half a bag of charcoal if that's what you desire so with this description out of the way no smoker is created perfect it's very common for smokers to lose heat by means of losing smoke and you can tell that whenever you have a good smoking fire a dirty smoke if you will you can see where the smoked is to come out of the edges but Oklahoma Jo has these little ribs all the way around the doors the main barrel door and the firebox door so I went ahead involve the gasket which is very common they sell this everywhere you can get it on Amazon big-box store then this particular gasket is the Oklahoma choke gasket it just happens to be big enough to go around all of those lama joe and now you can see at the very bottom where I left this also I could put my thermal pins in you can see where it's losing a little bit of smoke there that's well below whatever I'm cooking and I'm not going to be losing that much in the way of temperature the temperature that I'm counting on so going for a gasket is common with it only comes with one analog thermometer so why do they do that not everybody is going to use this smoker as a grill and if you grill on this smoker then you need to have the fire directly in between or underneath the right opening for the thermometer I want the second thermometer because I reel on this you know I have the I have a weber summit and things like that it's fine for me to cook two or three or four steaks on the weber summit but say i'm having a party and some people will not know some people won't chicken some people won't and burgers bla bla bla bla bla right here I'm gonna be cooking at all and it all cooks at different temperature and so you've got to keep in mind that if you're smoking you're gonna have hotter heat to the right and cooler heat to the left just keep that in mind you want your meat to be dead in the middle of those analog thermometers and you'll have a pretty good idea of where you need to be so that's why they leave it off and if you want to grill on it by all means I will leave the link where I purchased it from in the description below someone prepping this up you're probably wondering well if I love it so much what happened to mother Oklahoma joy well let me tell you I had a self inflicted wound on it I loved it so much i grilled on it all the time like weekly what really hurt that other grill is the fact that I wasn't using the firebox correctly we take the chimney I would pour hot fire in there and I would press all that fire up next to the side of the firebox and over time after hundreds of long live cooks it eventually started causing the outside of the firebox to kind of Schaaf all four are too kind kind of start peeling off and breaking off and this time I fixed it by buying a charcoal grate which is also Oklahoma Joe if you're interested I believe that Lincoln's description to it just makes perfect sense to keep your fire in a controlled area inside your firebox this way you're never compromising the size of that firebox and if you keep that cover on this grill it will last you many many many years I could have easily got 10 or 12 years out of my other grill it's just I self-inflicted wound caused me and caused myself to lose it in which any time I have a anytime I lose a grill it's a any time I have to get rid of a grill it's it's a bad day at this house and it's it's a bad day at this house so in recap it's a five-star product yes I'm a little partial because I bought Oklahoma Joe when they were the Oklahoma Joe out of Oklahoma and I'm originally was at Walmart this and then now it used to be an exclusive product to Walmart now you can pick them up any big-box retailer any home center something like that you can get on Amazon Amazon tends to be a little bit cheaper if you're a Prime member you don't have anything like shipping and yes it comes out your two guys take it off the truck you're gonna need somebody to help you move it or you could do like I did as soon as they brought it to my front door I unboxed it right there and took everything around piece by piece of the back door of course I have my wife help me and I just assembled it that way and the assembly went very quickly there's only a handful of parts and it's kind of self-explanatory the directions are perfect but you really don't need them so I hope this video helped you make a decision in some kind of way if you have any questions comments or concerns about anything I covered in this video please drop that down in the comment section if you like things like real life reviews DIYs or cooks then you're certainly in the right place and I appreciate you stopping by until next week this is real life reviews [Music]

Channel: Real Life Reviews

Views: 74,530

Rating: 4.8927097 out of 5

Keywords: Oklahoma Joe, Highland, Smoker, Grill, Real Life Reviews

Id: XiXFbXIylvM

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020