The Ultimate Guide to Fire Management | How to Manage Your Smoker Fire

[Music] [Music] you hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue I'm Jeremy Yoder and today I'm here at sex smokers from my buddy Eric I'm going to do a video all about fire management now if you're new to the channel or you haven't been around here very much be sure to subscribe down below and get the notification bell so you can stay up to date on all the newest information hopefully enjoy the videos that we put out no I mean one more time you can be the first to see it and hopefully stay up to date with all new satellite you're on a roll I was a good one why just you know like I was going let's do it again hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue I'm here with Eric west from fat stack smokers now I don't like that at all I hope that all of this information will be helpful to you when you're better forget all about fire management closer to each other okay go ahead okay all right okay what I can use that comfortably hey guys welcome to mad scientist BBQ now let's get into the video [Music] now the basic principles of fire management are pretty simple but there some the intricacies that require a little bit more explanation and so when we do fire management there are a couple things that we want to make sure that we do so first we want to earn an efficient fire so we want the wood that we're burning not only to be a major flavoring component for the meat but it's also what cooks for me the second thing and this is the big key if you take nothing else away from this video you have to understand this concept there's a difference between what's called clean smoke and dirty smoke clean smoke is essentially what that's being burned in an oxygen-rich environment producing smoke that you can barely see a lot of times it comes out of the smokestack and looks just like waves of heat you don't actually see smoke a lot of people think that means oh no you're not smoking the meat well let me tell you you are smoking whereas dirty smoke often comes from an oxygen purifier people are choking it off and that is the absolute worst thing you can do when barbecue now a lot of people get caught up in competition recipes and injections and brides and all kinds of other things to try to make their barbecue magical now what makes barbecue magical is none of those things there's a reason why no restaurant serves competition barbecue what makes barbecue magical is what happens in the fire box what happens in the fire box is where all the magic takes place where all the witchcraft that makes barbecue kind of a primal delicious thing that everybody enjoys so doing that right is the key to producing great barbecue you can forget rubs you can forget sauces you can forget marinades but you cannot forget good fire management now Eric builds tons of smokers for people in the Los Angeles area and all around the world actually even to the Middle East and so you not only have to build the smokers properly but you have people who come in here and know virtually nothing about fire management maybe they've only ever used a pellet smoker before so for you you've had to teach them from zero to I can run this pin sometimes it's a big 500 like this what are the problems that people usually like what what are the issues the big issues that come up over and over again well Jeremy I think you kind of nailed it the basic principle behind running an offset smoker is all about having the right fire burning the right way next to the meteor cooking and you can put any kind of rubs or sauces you want on there if your fire is no good your barbecue is no good Regis it's just that centric and that's true from the smallest little patio models all the way up to the big 500 thousand gallon trailer pits and so really knowing how to select you know cut and add fuel to these fires to get the fire to do what you want to do to cook the meat the way you want to cook is everything with these things it's not to you know complex of a process but there are some rules you have to follow right so I always say that barbecue isn't difficult but it requires patience basically it's not hard to know the basics of what's going on it just to be paying attention to all the details to be watching like a hawk that's the difficult part about it if you can do that you can produce great barbecue over and over and over again it's no secret to it that's right it's not you know set it and forget it it's labor-intensive you're going to be there throughout the duration of your cook actively managing your fire to make sure it's doing what you want to do right and so with an offset you're going to be there all day it'll ruin your day but if you have the world's best barbecue at the end of it it's totally worth it and there's a reason people keep buying offset smokers even though it'll fire so much more labor it's because in the end it's what will produce the absolute best product now with that we're going to move on to a critical component in fire management that people often don't really talk about it's about wood we're gonna go through the kind of wood you need the size of what you need and how you need to get it prepared to burn in your smoker I just like to produce a bag of charcoal when you're barbecuing one of the major components is you would you can use basically any hardwood now a lot has been written on the internet about this kind of wood works for this so you'll maybe buy bags of wood chunks online or at a at a hardware store or the barbecue store and I'll give you a list of this worked with chicken this works with pork this one works with beef really far more important than the kind of wood you're burning is the kind of fire you burn with that way now as long as you're using hardwood so a wood that bears a fruit or a nut you're going to be safe alright so there are a few examples of wood that you wouldn't want to use one hardwood that's just a particularly strong flavor is mesquite so if you're smoking for a long time stay away from that but what you absolutely positively never want to do is burn something like plaid now I once had a wood fired pizza that somebody cooked with pie this knucklehead seriously was using pine there was black smoke coming out of the stack and it was a disgusting pizza the reason you'd only use pine or what's like that is because you got to be burning SAP and producing just horrendous ly awful tastes don't do that so find a good wood in your area and one that you like and you'll be set also if you want to know more about the science of wood burning look for my upcoming video on wood science and then finally eric is going to show us how to get the wood to the appropriate size for your smoker so now that you've got your wood species all picked out and you're ready to build your fire you got to make sure you're using the right size fuel because the truth is the size of the wood you're gonna burn in your cooker is going to very much depend on the size of the cooker itself and somebody who's bringing a fire inside of a thousand gallon restaurant pit is not going to burn the same size logs as somebody who's burning a wood fire for say a little backyard size offset furthermore wood of course being a natural product doesn't come in straight perfect sticks from Mother Nature it grows in all kinds of wacky shapes and sizes and you'll get wood from the wood pile that'll look anything from these kind of you know quarter to half splits that are kind of rectangular but way too big to be burying anything with the biggest cookers all the way up to something like this sucker here and you wouldn't want to try and throw this on your fire okay so the first step is gonna be to take this guy and split them down to a usable diameter and they'll come back to the chop saw and chop the ends down if we need to shorten it up and make it the right size for our coal bed so there are a bunch of different ways to split your wood down to size everything from a traditional axe or a mall or sledgehammer setup all the way up to a little arrow or hydraulic or electric wood splitter like this up to a big industrial sized gas-powered wood splitter doesn't really matter how you do it but you do want to make sure that you're splitting down to the right guy for the sized cooker that you're going to be using for most offsets you're gonna want a diameter of splits that's no bigger than about three inches and a handy way to think of that is like a soda can are about as big around as your wrist now today I've got my little electric splitter here so I'm gonna go ahead and throw this log on here and pop it down to size one thing to know if you're gonna do this at home with any kind of power tools you want to make sure and know your way around the tool read the manual and take all proper safety precautions before you play with any power tools whatsoever above all you want to make sure you're operating these tools safely I would much rather spend my Saturday attending to a fire and waiting in line at the emergency room seriously with this guy oh yeah that looks about right yeah how about you for one deal here we go so this guy's about right maybe a little bit on the small side for some of the bigger pits but this will burn really nice and clean now that we've got our wood split down to the right diameter the last step is gonna be make sure it's the right length now most splits when you get them from a wood yard or me about 16 inches long which for your larger pits a 500-gallon like the one we're gonna cook on with Jeremy a little later this is gonna be a perfect length but for smaller pits like backyard models like the 60 which we're also going to play with in a little bit here this is going to be just a little bit too long you can tell how long your split should be on a smaller backyard pit using the width of your door if you try to take this piece of wood and put it through the door and it won't fit it's probably gonna be too long for your coal bed to bring it down to size we're gonna use the chop saw and just take a few inches off the end and now each other make sure to get me cutting off my finger on camera safety first shrunk [Music] [Music] so now we've got our wood you know split down to a nice diameter and cut down to a nice size but my question is why do we need to bother putting this guy on a fire and why can't I burn this sucker oh it's a great question so you might think there's like is it really worth it to go through all this hassle just to smoke some meat the answer is absolutely yes it's crucial now the reason offset smokers are still popular is because they produce the best barbecue you can possibly get now other kinds of pits like a weber smokey mountain or a Big Green Egg what you do is you put chunks of wood in there and the wood smoulders and you only put a little bit in because otherwise that meat gets over smoked while we're burning a hundred percent within these offset smokers how come the meat doesn't get over smoked the reason is because what we're producing when we burn the wood is something totally different where you get in those kinds of other smokers is smoldering what we get is clean flame so if you put something like this in a little backyard smoker you're gonna have all kinds of smoldering you're gonna see tons of white smoke and you can only deal with so much of that otherwise you're going to ruin the meat that you've spent hours and hours preparing so the size of the wood is often overlooked but it absolutely is a necessary component of producing great barbecue a lot of times people will contact me and they'll say hey I'm having trouble managing my fire and then I'll always ask what kind of smoker do you have and what size what are you using oftentimes people are trying to use big chunks of wood like this in backyard smokers that is the worst thing you can possibly do no matter what you try if you're usually wood like this you're never going to produce good smoke in a backyard smoker so produce wood that's the correct size burn a clean efficient fire and you're going to be able to produce the kind of barbecue that's going to keep people coming back for more and more over and over again you're gonna have too many friends to count now we're going to move on to showing you how to build fires in different sized pits for a little 60 gallon smoker this is beautiful exactly what you want but for a 500 gallon pit you could something like this and that coal bed is gonna be so big and so hot that it will eat this up no problem so we're going to show you the process by which you would run each fire in the different sized pits and you'll be able to from that work out what kind of splits you need for your size smoker a great way to start a fire on a medium to larger sized smoker is maybe something you haven't tried before but right here I have in my hand some used butcher paper from some briskets that are wrapped for an event that I did yesterday so you can actually be purpose this to start the fire again and all you really need you can have a lighter and you have the wood that you're going to need and then you have the butcher paper it's soaked in grease so this goes up and it burns for a long time and it might not seem like enough to get the job done but the grease that's embedded in the paper keeps it going and keeps it going kinda like a candle wick right so unlike just plain butcher paper which will burn really quickly this keeps it going for long enough to get the fire really just start off well and then after you like this you can walk away and come back in 30 minutes and you got a raging fire so this is how I like to set it up the first thing I like to do is I like to put the butcher paper in the firebox so the process is pretty simple first you put in the butcher paper and then you build your lattice of wood around it then you like to put your paper and you're good to go one important note the first log is that you put in here on a round firebox make sure that they go in horizontally because if you put them in this way they're gonna roll to the middle you're not gonna be able to make a proper structure so put them in horizontally so they stay in place and then the framework that you build above that will be stable [Music] [Music] now if you were here right now you could hear some sizzling and crackling maybe it's coming through on the camera but what's happening is that grease the rendered beef fat that's in the butcher paper that's burning and that's what's really going to get the fire going so at this point we can walk away and in a few minutes we'll have a rip-roaring fire but while we wait I think it's always best to open up the doors to the smoker so you get maximum airflow which you kind of have a negative effect of smoke coming back in your face if you're standing right next to fire backs like I am right now but it'll get the fire going more quickly and then you're not filling up your smoker with dirty gross smoke from the start of a fire now the fastest and easiest way to start a fire in a big smoker is by using a torch like this just what I do 70% of the time so all you have to do is point the torch at the wood we already construct your kind of lattice framework of wood in there and it's just nuke it with the torch until you got a rip-roaring fire and then you're ready to go then one other thing just remember this is a round bottom firebox so the first two pieces are whether you put in or four three if you want I'm going to go horizontally so the whole thing doesn't collapse so with that being said this is the easiest and probably my preferred method lighting fire [Applause] so when you use the torch method that I did say it's the easiest but just keep a couple things in mind the first thing is you want to point the torch down to the wood at the bottom because the flame we eat will rise and you'll be able to light the chunks of wood on top also when you use the torch a lot of times you'll use it for a while and then it looks like the fire has gone out that's just because the source of heat is now different so if you char everything inside really well it looks like the fires gonna die but you walk away for two or three minutes you come back and got a an open flame fire and all the wood is caught it's just because there's gonna be a an abrupt change from heat from the torch to heat generated by the wood that's inside burning itself then one critically important aspect that we neglected to mention earlier is how dry your wood is I'm gonna go into a lot of depth in my wood science video but I'll boil it down really simply what you want in your wood is about 20% moisture now there are two ways you can drive wood you can drive wood by having a kiln dried or you can let it sit out until it reaches kind of an equilibrium with its environment at about 20% moisture if you kill and dry your wood what you're gonna get is wood that catches immediately and burns really quickly doesn't have sustained characteristics and it doesn't provide good flavor for the meat itself so wait what is naturally dried wood so you let it sit out and usually in big piles it's gonna be seasoned wood as often what it's called doesn't even put any seasoning on it it's just been allowed to sit long enough to dry out to burn properly I'll fix that okay where's the show but one other thing is if you're allowing the wood to sit and you're allowing it to season yourself the way you store it is gonna be important so the moisture actually leaves the wood long ways because if you think about how wood forms it's from the form of vascular tissue of the plant itself what that means basically is that water moves through the wood this way so when water leaves after the woods been cut after the tree is dead it's gonna leave the exact same way it doesn't leave this way so the smaller the splits are right doesn't necessarily mean that it's gonna dry faster but the shorter the splits are has a greater effect now a thinner split will dry faster always but the biggest difference is how short the split itself is so you can imagine it this way if you just took a circular cut of a tree and let it sit out in a very short time it would be bone dry whereas if you took that same massive tree and had it through a long piece it would take many months for it to dry out so if you're cutting with yourself and you're going to stack it to its seasons well don't let the pieces be too long or else you're gonna have to wait a very very long time for it to be about 20% which so we're about ready to light the fire on this little model 60 here and I wanted to kind of walk you through how to set your smoker up in preparation for building your fire the first thing to probably notice is I've got the main door of the cook chamber open we do that to basically open up every possible vent in every possible door on the smoker so that when we built the fire it has as much oxygen going to it as possible the initial part of the burn once the coal bed develops and the fires burning the way we wanted to we can go ahead and close this door down and start adjusting our vents and our doors accordingly so I'm here with my little model 60 and I'm ready to light my fire I've got my logs they're ready to be stacked up in a little ball cabin or Madison all right so we're ready to start the fire I've got my wood in the form of our little splits that we've got cut down all right so I'm ready to start my fire I've got my wood in the form of splits that I've cut and split down to just the right size I've got my lighter and for this smoker we're going to use wood chips or tinder that we've gotten off of our splitter I've got a bucket here filled with little bits of tiny wood splinters and chips that have come off of our wood splitter and honestly this stuff lights like napalm it's a perfect way to start a fire all you got to do is just save this stuff when it comes off your splitter you can also buy bags of wood chips at the store works just as well and you're gonna make a pile of this right in the middle of your smoker and then on top of that you're gonna build your splits and lighting [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] all right so once I've applied the lighter to it now the logs are lit or at least the Tinder's lit and burning nice and hot it will ignite the logs on top of it and before you know it our fire will be ready to start adding fuel and the rest of the cooker in the meantime will come up to temperature and then we're ready to add meat and cook some barbecue yeah it's my mom's birthday today and I've kind of missed the birthday because I've been here filming this stuff so I just texted her with a happy birthday text and this was her response good luck on YouTube happy birthday mom they probably heard a lot about clean smoke versus dirty smoke in the past but I want to break down exactly what I mean okay so what I mean by clean smoke is what you see coming out of this guy right here so if you look up at there you see maybe a little bit of a wisp of smoke every now and then but what I see mostly is just waves of heat and that's because we're burning the fire efficiently so in essence when you're burning wood it's mostly carbon hydrogen and oxygen right but you're exposing it to more oxygen through the air and it's bursting into flames and it's producing heat it's enough to travel across the food and then up the smokestack so if you've got plenty of oxygen and your fire is burning hot you produce different compounds then if your fire isn't very hot and you don't have enough oxygen so high heat high oxygen produces small gas molecules and so those are harder to see when you have big molecules that haven't been fully oxidized ever and burned at a high enough temperature you see that as white smoke so when we say thin blue smoke or clean smoke something like that what we really mean you're sporting a hot fire with lots of oxygen so that the compounds that you produce are the most flavorful compounds because when you produce those big compounds those aren't actually good tasting compounds when you take a bite of it at first oh it tastes smoky like oh it's a smoky this is good but after a couple bites you realize oh wait a minute this isn't good once you've had barbecue made with clean smoke you can immediately recognize barbar you made with dirty so the chemical reactions that are going on in the firebox are very complicated but in essence you want to burn a hot fire with lots of oxygen and then you can produce the kind of smoke that you want now when you burn things you produce carbon dioxide and water vapor and basically everything that you burn and then you produce other compounds okay so we're trying to affect those other compounds so if you burnt fire say so clean that it was only producing carbon dioxide and water vapor you wouldn't get any smoke flavor on your meat it would be just like cooking something on a gas grill because those products are only carbon dioxide and water vapor so for us we're trying to burn a fire that's very very clean but we're still producing compounds that on co2 or water vapor because wood is a natural product there's never going to be 100% efficiency than burning but you can always make sure that your fire has oxygen that you have structured the fire in a way that it will burn well and that's how you get the coveted thin blue smoke which is exactly now if you want to see an example of dirty smoke we'll show you that right now so Eric once you close that firebox door and we're going to deprive the fire of oxygen alright so now I start to see more wisps of smoke in probably 30 seconds it'll be a slow like super thick white smoke that's coming out of there and it's going to be gross not the kind of stuff you want on here me [Music] that smoke is brought to you by Trager so this is exactly what we're talking about thick white smoke for a lot of beginners they think this is what you want and I'm here to tell you no no no no no it is absolutely not okay so you've seen the two extremes of clean and dirty smoke and during a cook you're going to get you know variation every time you add a new log you'll get a little bit of white smoke as that log catches but for the vast majority of the time you're cooking what you should see is the clear heat waves or maybe just a thin wispy smoke coming out of your smoker and one got cold bad guys yeah well I don't know how well it showed up on camera before I'm talking about like the heat waves of clean smoke but if you want to get a good picture of what I'm talking about if you look at the set on my 500 right now as I'm looking through it I see that metal tube that sits back there at the place next door it looks all wavy and like the lines aren't straight that's exactly what I mean we see clean heat coming out even though we're burning lots of wood in the firebox let me take a look at the fire box full of wood lots of flame so it's not like there's nothing going on but what we're doing is we're creating those most flavorful compounds and that's the look that you want [Music] ain't got no respect for nobody enough they don't want to work hard they don't want to do what's right I think that's the only thing that makes sense to me because you know the government ain't gonna tell you the truth you know there's like AM elections they decide who's gonna windows much before they ever had you know with the glasses it's actually a little bit scary yeah well you know from Pam 15 three two one fire now when cooking on a backyard smoker like this sixty gallon pit right here the principles of fire management are exactly the same as with one of these big pits but the dynamics change slightly so what I want to talk about right now is well you know that the firebox is the heart of any smoker and the heart of the firebox is the coal bed so what we work really hard to do when barbecuing is to build a great coal bed because that's what's gonna light the next logs that you put on and it's really what's going to fuel there's what's gonna push forward you're a whole cook if you let your coal bed go then you've got major problems trying to get your wood to burn cleanly and efficiently but if you keep your coal bed in check then you're gonna have easy lights on the wood that you put in and every part of the process will be made simpler and easier so let's take a look at this coal bed and then Eric's going to show us how he runs the fire in this offset smoker right here that all right so here we've got the coal bed so it's just essentially the wood that's burned down to just coals and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna kind of flatten it up so that we can use that as the base for the fire going forward now notice that there's no great in here now a lot of smokers come with great to them and in my opinion you may disagree but in my opinion I don't like them because usually what happens in my experience is that those coals get burned up because they have oxygen coming in from all around and they turn into ash and they fall down to the bottom so when you put your next log on there it has a really hard time catching but because these coals are essentially like charcoal they don't have to have a bunch of oxygen around them because they're not going to provide a bunch of dirty smoke like you know a log wood so what what I want to do is use the coal that is essentially just a big reservoir of heat so that every time I put on another log boom it catches right away and so we've been filming and talking for a little while and so this coal bed needs to have more fuel added and if we don't then it's gonna die which we do not want so Eric's going to show you exactly how he will adjust this coal bed and how it placed the fuel into the firebox so you can tell your wood has cooled down completely when it kind of is in the same shape as it was looks like the original sticks that you put in there but now it's completely covered in gray ash and you can see a nice orange glow coming from inside of it I'm gonna take the shovel and I'm gonna kind of rake it around a little bit that's going to even everything out and give you a nice even heat across the coal bed now we're ready to add some fuel [Music] and within just a few seconds you should see flames bursting out of the logs that you put on the coal bed which means they are starting to burn nice and cleanly which means they're gonna be contributing nice clean heat to your cook chamber and whatever you've got cooking inside so I'm going to close this door back up and let it get back to its thing [Music] okay Fitzie we can't believe how much I'm schvitzing over here this is the big fluffy alright now in terms of running the fire there are some things you can do that will help you out and other things that will hinder you now if you've got nice dry perfect wood then this next step isn't necessary but it never hurts so if you just want to make sure that you start burning clean fire immediately or your wood is maybe a little too green it's got a little too much water in it what you can do is take your splits and put them on top of your firebox this preheats the wood so it's closer to the temperature at which would produce flame and it heats up the wood so that water gets forced out so it's going to be a drier hotter piece of wood so when you put it on your fire it'll get going like that a lot of people are thinking about trying to burn a perfectly clean fire a lot of times means they leave the door wide open to the firebox which it's not bad but you're really wasting a lot of fuel and a lot of those good flavorful compounds that you want to go to your meat are exiting through the firebox door so what I like to do in terms of burning an efficient fire as much as I possibly can and still burning a clean fire I take the door and I crack it like that so there's a gap like that big so there's plenty of room for air to rush in there's lots of oxygen it doesn't start producing a dirty fire but it forces the air to move across the cooker and up out the smokestack because it's leaving there and it's drawing everything in so you don't get waste so if I open the door all the way there's put my hand here it's super super hot because I'm losing heat and losing smoke and I want that to go and cook my food and flavor my food so this pushes in all the heat allows the air to get drawn in and then you're burning not only a clean fire but one that's going to use less wood in the end over the course of a long cook if you're doing brisket on one of these sixteen hours a lot of things can happen say you're cooking overnight and you fall asleep and then you wake up and run over to your fire box and all you've got left if something looks like this something looks like just coals there's no active fire going I know the situation I have been there I've definitely fallen asleep the times when I shouldn't have so the way to reconcile this is you get some nice splint something that's appropriate size for your smoker definitely nothing too big and you're going to place them on the coals and you're going to kind of nurse the fire back to health so right now it's not a healthy fire but luckily we have enough calls in there that it shouldn't be a huge problem to get it going again astral region running the fire in the pit is what I do for the vast majority of when I'm barbecuing so it's not injecting stuff it's not working on marinades or doing any kind of fancy stuff to the meat it's actually a couple hours of prep and then 16 maybe 18 hours of cook which is primarily this you know at some point I'll pull everything out and wrap it but this is what I do day in day out when I'm barbecuing this is really my main job I watch fires that's really it's really what I do and so sometimes I joke about that people asked me what I do for a living and they say i watch fires but really this is what I'm doing and so if you look at this one this is a perfectly healthy fire this is exactly what you want to see and while you're running the pit you're eventually going to be adding more and more wood and people will say how often do you have a split to me it's not a time issue it's I was the pit running so if the temperature starts to drop off right as soon as it starts to drop off I'm going to add another piece of wood because depending on the size of wood and just kind of the nature of the fire you'll grow to learn exactly what putting a piece of wood will do to the temperature in your pit and so right now it's perfect the way it is everything's running beautifully there's nothing that needs to happen but when it comes time to add a piece of wood to your fire you always want to put it so that it's stacking kind of in a lattice structure on the logs that are still there and so what I mean by that is right now they have two logs going like this this one I would put in this way like that because going to stack up that way and fire likes to climb up on things and so this allows the fire to climb up and start to ignite that log on top rather than it's sitting somewhere on the side it just kind of smoldering away that's what you don't want to do now one issue that makes a 500 really forgiving is the size of the coal bed and the temperature of the coal bed because you can use a huge chunk of wood in here and it'll eat it up or you can put in a couple pieces of wood and it's not going to make your temperature spike like crazy it's not going to do a 200 degree jump nothing like that so it's forgiving in that sense and so to just illustrate how hot this pole which is great which is what you want I've brought out this infrared thermometer now this is a 3,000 degree Beast I love this thing and in my experience backyard pits usually have a full bed temperature of about 1,200 degrees maybe 1,300 and bigger pits the the bigger the pit the higher the temperature of the coal bed so that 250 I'm guessing is probably somewhere on 1500 this one right here if I'm gonna guess I'm gonna say that's going to be between 16 and 1800 degrees probably but let's try it and find out [Music] 2,100 degrees yeah that's the hottest it's ever been whoo did you could keep and grill a steak in like 10 seconds in that piece check this guy yeah let's check it out I've never measured the temperature that hot in one of my fires but this is cool yeah so most of this cold bed is yeah right at between 16 and 1800 degrees 1870 right there 1712 1823 1885 1875 1795 so between 16 and 1800 degrees is usual but there's that one spot in there where those coals are glowing white-hot so it is very very toasty so the moral of the story is if you got a screamin hot coal bed actually it's kind of uncomfortable to be right here because it's so hot you got a screamin hot coal bed that's a lot of forgiveness you could toss on a big log and it was eat it right up because there's so much heat in those coals that you'll surpass the temperature at which wood smolders and go right to the temperature at which it breaks into flame all right we're here at the 288 gallon tank and if you guys aren't familiar with how one of these things works basically you point and you click the button and it'll give you a temperature reading so I like this because I can use it to reach temperatures of a coal bed because this thing goes to 3,000 degrees because I had a brilliant idea I thought you know what I'm gonna go get an infrared thermometer and you know measure the temperature the smoke or different places measured temperatures of coal bed but I couldn't find any that read high enough temperatures to read the temperature the fire the coal bed so I went and got this guy thermal works and I love it because no matter how hot something is I can point shoot it tells me the temperature so this one my guess is it's going to be somewhere between 1400 and 1600 degrees so let's point it out the coal bed and see we get right there oh so we got 1655 the 1488 1557 16:15 1598 1562 so most of its 1500 to 1600 degrees in that coal bed right there which is pretty much exactly what I expected and so the good thing about this is much like the 500 you can put wood on and it'll catch right away so that you have kind of just this momentum of the cook going on you put in a log the catches right away put in a log it catches right away you cooking me and you're sending flavor and heat through the smoker cooking your meat and providing all the deliciousness that you want in barbecue now to demonstrate how quickly would catches fire this is actually a pretty green log it's pretty heavy after you've had a little bunch of wood you'll be able to tell right away upon picking one up whether it's pretty green or well-seasoned this one's pretty heavy but because the fire is hot enough like to take this and throw it on top and it's gonna be catching fire really soon so I spread those logs out so that I can set this one just like that just like in the big pit you want a lattice structure so the flames can rise so throw this guy on there all right we got that guy there now and so my guess is 60 seconds it'll be put okay less than 60 seconds right now it's already bursting into flame and so this is gonna be perfect we can kind of close the door down keep cooking and you're going to repeat this process until you've completed the cook and at that point you're going to close everything down taking me to have everything's great but this is the process that you use to produce great barbecue so we've got a Franklin barbecue in Texas this is what they're doing they're managing the fire our after how are they keeping it clean they're making sure that they keep enough fire in the firebox to keep the cook going forward this is where all the magical BBQ happens that's how you feed a fire that's how you keep it going what's another point is it oh wow yeah this is more normal 1807 1950 1901 70 can yeah that's normal now the last issue I want to address is where in the fire box you should build your fire now for me when I build a fire I build it close to the outside door and the reason for that is that gives me more space between where the fire actually is and the beginning of where the meat starts in the coaching because that allows those super hot exhaust gases to cool down a little bit before they actually go and hit the meat and so even a small change in temperature a small temperature drop can have a big effect on how it treats the meat when it gets there because the hotter you go the greater the distribution of speeds of the molecules what that means is basically this at a low temperature all the molecules are basically going the same speed you have some that are a little hotter and some that are a little cooler but the hotter you get then have some radical super hot exhaust gases and then some that are a little cooler but the average which is what temperature is the average kinetic energy is somewhere in the middle but the curve of those molecules is flattened out all that's to say this I think it's better to build your fire close to the door so that you're really excited really hot molecules of gas have a chance to calm down before they go and burn stuff inside the co-chair and so cool build it closer you can build it right next to the opening to the co chamber you can build it in the middle of the firebox but for the reasons I just mentioned I like to build it closer to the door now people might say oh well if you build it close to the door gonna lose heat and smoke out the backend know what you can do is you close the door down about like this so that because the fire is craving oxygen it's going to pull in air and it's going to travel across the cook chamber and out to smoke stack at the other end still going to be burning a perfectly clean fire but there's no inefficiency in the fire leaving at the wrong side should I include a thing on the apron for I guess a holster for this guy that's sick would that mean you're like I wonder what that temperature is I can tell you nailed it yeah and now you're 91 degrees yeah thank you guys for watching I know we threw a lot of information at you I really hope it was helpful if you did find it helpful and if you enjoyed the video hit subscribe down below and then hit the notification bell so you get updates every time we put out new content so until next time keep experimenting and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 507,444

Rating: 4.84062 out of 5

Keywords: fire management, smoker, barbecue, offset, jeremy yoder, mad scientist, brisket, ribs

Id: 9fb9gEQ5804

Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019