The RIGHT WAY to manage a fire on an offset smoker | Fire management on the Oklahoma Joes

managing a fire in an offset smoker is very difficult in fact it's one of the most difficult things you can do in barbecue and if you don't nail the fundamentals and get them right you can waste a lot of fuel and your barbecue can come out really bitter and acreage so in this video i'm going to make fire management easy for you and break it down step by step we're going to talk about preheating your smoker your firebox setup how to use the right type of fuel how to maintain consistent temperatures and clean burning smoke and much more let's start talking about how an offset smoker works because i know a lot of people including myself when i first started assume that an offset smoker works like other smokers unlike a charcoal smoker like a weber smoky mountain or a drum smoker unlike a pellet grill unlike an electric smoker offset smokers are unique because they're meant to be run with small hot fires that burn actual wood with an offset smoker the pit master builds a small hot fire using actual hardwood splits in the offset firebox that firebox gets really hot it sends all that smoky hot air through the cooking chamber at a very low temperature around 200 to 300 degrees fahrenheit and then it exits throughout the exhaust stack throughout this whole system it creates a convection current and a draft that gets sucked in through the firebox vent opening and out through the exhaust stack and it creates a constant flow of hot air that flows over your barbecue gives it awesome smoky flavor that you can't reproduce with any other type of smoker because you're burning actual live wood and the bark that these things can produce on barbecue is unparalleled by any other smoker so i like to say that it's almost like cooking your barbecue with a hair dryer because you're blowing hot air out of the firebox over the meat and out the exhaust stack and your job as the pit master is to control that draft control that fire in the firebox so that it's always lit and it's always producing a constant amount of clean burning heat now the key to making all of this work is to provide sufficient air flow so that air can get into the firebox provide a sufficient opening at the stack end the exhaust side of the offset smoker so you can create that draft and use really dry clean burning hardwood fuel in the firebox and maintain that fire throughout the whole process if you use charcoal by itself you're not going to get to the temperatures you need to cook low and slow barbecue it's always going to be below 200 degrees fahrenheit unless you add a ton of charcoal and you keep on loading that firebox with charcoal like you're a train conductor or something and trust me guys i did this when i first started and i went through bags and bags of charcoal until i finally figured out that you need to use actual hardwood and burn it to make this thing operate correctly so once we provide the firebox with the type of fuel it needs which is really dry hardwood splits we give it enough airflow so the vent is open the exhaust is open the third most important thing to do is you need to keep the firebox lit if it ever goes out if it ever stops flaming that's going to start producing really thick smoke that's going to make your barbecue taste really dirty and acreage so what we're always aiming for is to see that thin blue smoke coming out of the exhaust stack it should almost be invisible you shouldn't see really any visible smoke coming out of the exhaust stack and if you don't see any smoke and it just is like a shimmering stream of heat coming out that is exactly what we want to produce and a lot of people assume that the more smoke the better and they want that billowing white smoke to come out of the stack but trust me guys that is going to make your barbecue taste like garbage and it's going to be way too smoky so if you want to get the awesome flavors that an offset smoker was meant to produce you always want that thin blue smoke now let's talk about your firebox setup there's a couple things you can do here the most easy thing you can do is you can just build the fire on the bottom of the firebox but this isn't usually recommended because it doesn't allow any airflow underneath your fire and it can actually damage the steel on your firebox so the paint can peel off it'll get a lot more rusty and you can actually weaken the material so that's not the most ideal way of setting up your firebox the second way of doing it is you can put a horizontal grate down on the bottom of your firebox so that lifts it off of the bottom provides some more airflow and it gets it away from the firebox sidewalls so it doesn't peel the paint or damage the metal you can also get a charcoal basket which you can place inside your firebox you can elevate it a little bit off of the floor of the firebox and start your fire with some charcoal and then put your splits on top of that charcoal basket and it really intensifies and magnifies the heat within that basket so it's a preferred method for a lot of people especially people who use the oklahoma joe's offset smoker the way that i like to set up my firebox is in a v format so i use three of the grates that came with my smoker i put one horizontal so it elevates the fire off of the bottom of the firebox to provide some airflow and then i do a v-shaped setup with my grates on top of that and what this does is it provides airflow all around the fire it intensifies the fire and makes it smaller and hotter because there's a smaller area where those charcoal can funnel down and burn and then as your fire burns down it doesn't spread out and go towards the sides it's all funneled down towards the bottom of the v so it just gets more intensified it doesn't get spread out as you burn so that's the way that i like to do it preheating your offset smoker so we always have to preheat the offset smoker for at least an hour because there's a lot of metal there's a lot of mass here that needs to come up to temperature so that it can maintain consistent temperature so make sure you plan ahead and wake up early enough that you can plan for about an hour or two to preheat your smoker that is going to help you a ton in your fire management and to maintain consistent temperatures to preheat my smoker i like to fill a charcoal chimney up to the brim with natural lump charcoal the bigger the better it's just going to burn hotter and last longer i put some crumpled up paper and some paper towel in a little ball and then i drizzle some oil that just helps it burn more cleanly and for longer and then i place the charcoal chimney on top of it i light it with a little torch and then i leave it for about 15 minutes until it starts to get really white hot after that i take the charcoal chimney i close the vent all the way to the firebox because if you just dump it in without that vent closed then a lot of that charcoal can just fall right out of your firebox i open the firebox door i dump it in i leave about a third of the charcoal left in the chimney because i like to do two loads of charcoal to preheat it so i leave a third of that burning hot charcoal in so i don't have to re-light it and then i dump more fresh charcoal on top of it in the chimney i let that preheat again light that charcoal and then i put it back into the firebox on top of the existing charcoal now at this point i open the air intake all the way i don't use the little vent on the oklahoma joe's offset smoker because it doesn't allow enough air in so i just leave that whole door open the whole time i leave my exhaust vent open all the way i never shut it down i control all of my temperatures by adding wood at the right time in the right quantity instead of using the air intake and exhaust to control the fire because that just inhibits the airflow in the smoker then i place a fresh split of hard wood on top of the charcoal in the firebox in this case i'm using applewood and i leave the firebox lid open for about 10 minutes for that first hardwood split to really catch because this is the first piece of hardwood i'm adding to my firebox i really want to start building up that coal bed and that flame so i'm really giving it a lot of air at this point there's no meat inside the smoker at this point this is all just preheating up until now and after about 10 minutes that first split of hardwood should be getting completely black and also getting a little bit almost white around the edges and that tells me that my fire is now officially started i could close the firebox lid and then i can start putting my meat inside the smoker let's talk a little bit about fuel now as i mentioned before offset smokers they're called stick burners for a reason because they run on small hot fires that are fueled by hardwood splits so i have two sizes of hardwood splits here this is applewood and i've actually kiln dried this until it's got a moisture level of 10 or below usually when you get wood it's been seasoned for a few years or it's kiln dried you can technically burn anything that's under 20 moisture and i use a moisture meter that i picked up on amazon to test the moisture of these splits of hardwood but really ideally you want to cook with something that is 10 or below in moisture if you have too much moisture in your hardwood then you're going to produce a lot of creosote and moisture that flows into your cooking chamber and it produces an acrid taste in your meat so you don't want too much moisture in your hardwood splits and you definitely can't use green wood you need to use either kiln-dried wood or seasoned wood that's been seasoned for like one or two years this is the first size of split i use it's about an eight-inch split and i like it because you can insert it into the firebox door without having to go lengthways so this is what i usually use when i'm up at operating temperature and i'm monitoring the fire and it's just dying down and this is what i throw in to maintain those temperatures what i use for starting the fire or when my fire is getting way too low in temperature is these longer hardwood splits so this is about 11 12 almost up to 14 inches and this is for when i really need a boost of heat and i can just stick that in lengthways into the smoker box and provide a lot of heat so those are the two types of sizes i use in order to get them to these sizes i usually take the splits that i buy they come in about 12 inch length by i don't know like six inch diameter and so they're pretty big you couldn't just put one into a small offset smoker and expect it to burn efficiently so i split them with my axe and once they're the width that i want then i just use my table saw to cut them down to 8 or 11 inch lengths the second type of fuel you're going to use is natural lump charcoal you can also use charcoal briquettes i just prefer to use natural lump charcoal because it burns hotter and longer and some people say that it produces a better flavor because it's less refined and it's closer to the real thing than a charcoal briquette i've never tasted the difference to be honest but i just like using these things mainly because they burn a long time so there's lots of different brands of charcoal briquettes this is a camato joe's big block i like those because they're bigger than other natural lump charcoal brands and they burn even longer and hotter than other brands so that's why i use them so you mainly use charcoal to start the fire in your firebox and then you maintain it with your hardwood splits but sometimes if you're doing a really long cook you can get six hours in and all of your charcoal your original charcoal can burn down and you're not really able to maintain the temperatures that you want anymore so sometimes you might have to put a fresh chimney of new charcoal into your firebox to replenish that charcoal bed again now if you guys don't believe me that you need really really dry smaller splits of hardwood to run this thing effectively then here's a video i did a couple weeks ago where i put a seasoned piece of applewood onto the fire and it didn't really catch at all until about 20 minutes later you can see there's a lot of smoke coming off it it was producing a lot of bad smoke and it just wasn't catching easily and then you can see in this video where the relative humidity in this split was below 10 percent because i'd kiln dried it it catches immediately it produces really clean thin blue smoke so that is where we want it so if you guys are having issues maintaining constant temperatures or if you're getting too much white acreage smoke coming out of your smoker then one of the problems you might be having is your wood is just too wet so in that case it's good to get a moisture meter if you're buying a lot of wood to burn in these things and also i like to use my electric smoker as basically a makeshift kiln so if the wood is too wet then i put it inside my electric smoker and i just do a burn off at 275 degrees for six to seven hours and that takes a lot of the moisture out of it it's basically like kiln drying it very quickly so let's take a look at my setup in the main smoking chamber i have a baffle plate which is basically a crate that i've wrapped with aluminum foil and i've set that up against the firebox angled downwards and that's going to deflect all the hot air that's coming off that fire and make sure that it goes down before it goes up again otherwise you might get a situation where it just goes up out of the firebox over top of the meat and it never even touches the meat and the temperature at great level is super low so that deflector plate is super important to maintain the temperature in your cooking chamber i've also got some bricks that i've lined the bottom of the offset smoker with this is just to help maintain temperature and i've wrapped them in aluminum foil just to make sure that grease doesn't get onto them and lastly in order to monitor temperature in the main cooking chamber i don't use the dome thermometers at all really because they usually read a lot hotter than what is actually happening at great level because hot air rises so it's all stuck in the dome and that dome thermometer reading can be way off in a lot of cases so i use a meter probe which is a wireless probe that sends the temperature readings directly to my phone i just stick it inside of a potato because one of the ends of it actually measures internal temperature which i don't need so i stick it into a potato and i just use the ambient temperature side if i'm doing something like a brisket i might stick it right in the brisket and that can measure the brisket temperature at the same time as giving me the ambient temperature at great level but for the purposes of most of my cooks i just stick it in like a potato or something and the benefit is that every few hours you get a tasty potato that you can eat if you are doing a long cook but now we'll talk about maintaining our temperatures i like to target a temperature zone that's about plus or minus 25 degrees fahrenheit so i've got about 50 degrees of wiggle room if i try to maintain temperatures within 25 degrees or even 10 degrees that requires a lot more diligence and effort and basically babysitting your fire than trying to maintain 50 degrees so i'll usually target a temperature zone of around 200 to 250 or alternatively depending on what i'm cooking i might target 250 to 300. so to maintain that temperature i have my phone in my hand which is telling me from my meter app the ambient temperature at all times inside of my offset smoker i have my hardwood chunks which are on top of the firebox i actually made a custom made grate that i just made out of an old barbecue grate and this makes it so that i can still preheat my splits but i can still open the firebox door and i'm not always taking pieces of hardwood off of the firebox lid if i have to get in there for some reason i also have a little makeshift mirror that i set up because sometimes it's hard to see what the fire is doing if you're just looking down on it because it's raised up quite a bit and i can't really see the fire unless i really get my head in there so a mirror is really handy to get a really good angle on your fire and see what's happening inside the firebox at all times without opening the lid all the time so in addition to having all that wood on top of the firebox to preheat i also have one at all times preheating in the little alcove that's created by the v setup on my grill just by the nature of the way that i set up my grates it's the perfect little slot for a v-shaped split to fit in and that's a good way of preheating your wood really quickly so i take that split and right when my temperature is about 10 minutes away from dropping off i put that new split on top of the fire so i give it about 10 minutes to catch fire and start producing heat and as soon as that old split starts to drop in temperature that new split starts to contribute to the heat and it maintains an even temperature whatever i'm aiming at in this case for my example it's 250 degrees fahrenheit now how can you anticipate when your fire is going to start decreasing in temperature well there's a couple ways you can just measure the amount of time that each split produces heat so you'll know that each split of a similar size produces heat for about 30 to 40 minutes so that means about 20 to 30 minutes in you need to add a new split so that it can start catching fire and start contributing to that temperature by the time the old split burns out the second way is you can just look at the existing split see what it's doing if it's really dark and black and it's cracking and it doesn't look like it has as much oomph left in it as it did before if it's not producing as much flame as it did in the first part of when you just put it onto the charcoal bed then you'll know that it's probably going to start losing heat pretty quickly so that's a good time to start adding your fresh split a lot of this is just knowing your unit knowing your smoker and knowing exactly what size and type of fuel you're using and knowing roughly how much heat your splits of wood are going to produce in the firebox so that is why it's super important to control the humidity that's inside of your splits of firewood that's why i like to kiln dry them and also the size and shape and weight of them the more consistent you can get your splits the more you can control your fire more effectively because you'll know exactly how much heat it can produce as soon as you put a split in the firebox and when you need to replace them and that is how i manage my temperatures i don't touch the exhaust or the intake valve at all to control temperatures i just manage it with splits of hardwood and lastly i wanted to give you guys a couple pieces of troubleshooting advice if you're getting a lot of thick white smoke let's say your fire went out inside your firebox and that split that you added is no longer flaming in that case you want to open your firebox immediately make sure the vents are wide open you can either blow on it or you can wave like a big piece of cardboard on it to provide more air make sure that split ignites again or add a fresh dry split if you need to and if there's a ton of dirty white smoke inside of your cooking chamber then you're really just gonna have to open your cooking chamber and clear it out get that bad smoke out until you're producing good clean thin blue smoke again and then you can shut everything down and you can continue to maintain temperatures what happens if your temperature gets way too high and you're worried about burning whatever you're cooking inside the cooking chamber well in this case we don't want to shut down any of the vents because that's just going to produce a situation where we have the thick white smoke and then you'll have to basically reset the whole system like i just talked about so what you want to do if it's burning too hot inside your firebox is just open the lid of the firebox open and just leave it open all of that hot air is now going to vent through the firebox lid and not into the cooking chamber so it's going to decrease the heat inside the cooking chamber by a lot and you just let that fire burn down burn down burn down for about 10 to 15 minutes as long as it takes then you can shut the firebox lid and it should be more in line with the temperatures you want to maintain and if you're worried about decreasing the cooking chamber temperature too much when you do that i wouldn't worry about it too much i've done this before and usually it only comes down by a few degrees because there's still hot air from that firebox getting inside the cooking chamber even though you have the firebox lid wide open now what happens if your firebox fire goes out completely let's say you get pulled away with an emergency you don't have time to monitor the temperature in the firebox or you fall asleep or something well in that case you basically have to restart the whole process from scratch so you fill up a chimney you dump it inside the firebox you start your new log in those situations which have happened to me before especially if you're smoking in really cold weather it can get away from you and you can forget and the temperature can drop pretty drastically so in those cases i usually just open my firebox door all the way i dump the charcoal in the firebox i put a new split of hardwood on and i just let it burn for like 10 to 20 minutes just to really uh burn off that charcoal and get it down to coals because i don't like cooking my barbecue with fresh black charcoal that i put in the firebox i want to burn off some of the impurities first and get it really screaming hot before i close this lid and allow that heat and smoke to get inside the cooking chamber if you guys are looking for a great brisket recipe to use your new offset smoker skills on i'll link one right here and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Smoke Trails BBQ

Views: 473,163

Rating: 4.9081445 out of 5

Keywords: bbq, smoke trails bbq, smoked meat, fire management on an offset smoker, offset smoker, oklahoma joes offset smoker, how to maintain temperatures on an offset smoker, offset smoker fire management, managing an offset smoker fire, controlling an offset smoker fire, how to use an offset smoker

Id: 0Wo9gK1MP9c

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020