This Piece of Metal Can Make or Break Your Offset Smoker

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue I'm Jeremy Yoder and today we're going to talk about how a small piece of metal can either make or break an offset smoker a couple months ago I went up to Northern Indiana and I bought a freaking awesome smoker it was designed in a way that I'd never seen before I had kind of talked about it I had heard other people kind of mention that idea I went and checked it out and I thought this is interesting and then I took it on a tour of Texas and we cooked with some top barbecue people and it was awesome and I got to really see how the thing works and I've got to say it's the best smoker of any kind or any size that I've ever cooked on which actually kind of bugged me because I have a thousand gallon smoker that I built and this thing that we're giving away it Cooks better I mean it's just so cool and I got to tell you about this unique design aspect and why it makes such a huge difference by the way today is the last day to enter to win that thing so if you want a life-changing smoker if you have a barbecue side hustle that you want to start if you have a barbecue side hustle you want to get bigger if you have a desire to do a catering business or you're starting a restaurant you're just waiting on a pit this is a thousand gallon pit on a trailer I added a wood rack people always ask me well what does a big Offset Smoker on a trailer need well it needs to work really well and this one is incredible and it needs a wood rack so I added a wood rack to it and today is the last day so click on the link in the description you go buy a collectible coffee mug and you get automatically entered to win and if the person is anywhere near me I will hand deliver it myself okay so if it's something I can get to in a day I will deliver it to you I'll shake your hand but that is the deal there It Ends Tonight at 11 59 PM so you have to to enter today if you want to win this thing I partnered with a veteran-owned small business to do this giveaway so I'm really excited about what it's doing for both the company for the person who's going to win it for my channel and it gave me an opportunity to go to Texas and cook with some of my barbecue Heroes taking the smoker on a Texas barbecue tour was so much fun it's been to some really cool places it's been cooked on by Evan Leroy of Leroy and Lewis it's been cooked on by Joe Yim who worked at Leroy Lewis truth barbecue Terry blacks it's been cooked on by Brad Robinson of Chuck's Barbecue it's been seen by Aaron Franklin it's been seen by the folks at Goldies it's been around for a smoker which is really neat and I've cooked on it not that that really matters but I can tell you how it cooks and it's awesome so last chance to win click on the link in the description but we had so much fun on the trip because Joe went with us the whole time and Brad hung out with us for a lot of it too and I want to show you some of the clips from that trip because it was a blasting kind of see where the smoker has been and a little bit about its story and then we'll jump into that design feature check it out if you guys know me I'm usually against baffles I don't like them [Music] [Music] laughs [Music] into the 12-hour close we got that heat pretty high right now we're trying to [Music] believe [Music] tired I'll be feeling great around 11AM tomorrow oh [Music] so let's jump into that unique design feature that I think made that smoker cook so incredibly well we'll talk more about that at the end but let's talk about some of the different approaches companies use and why I don't prefer them so first we have an old country Brazos now I still think this is the best value for money if you're talking quarter inch thick smokers the gold standard of thickness but there's one design feature that I think is pretty easily remedied and the issue that a lot of people have is with the baffle so the baffle essentially is a piece of metal that is above the opening from the Firebox to the Cook chamber and it forces the gases down and so you don't have a hot spot right next to the Firebox so let's take a look at this one then we'll talk a little bit more about it I'm gonna move that move that all right here we see the baffle the gases from the Firebox come down and then they come back up right in the middle so if you have a thermometer here and a thermometer here what you get is relatively even temps but you have lots of airflow and the highest temperatures right in the middle which means that the hottest part of the entire cook chamber is directly in the center of your grate which is not ideal so it's one of those circumstances where the thermometers read even on both sides but in the middle something very different is going on add to that the fact that not only does the temperature matter but the amount of airflow matters that's where the greatest airflow and the highest temperatures are so if you put a brisket right there and you're not super careful about keeping your temperatures in check you're going to burn the bottom of that brisket or pork butt or ribs or whatever you put there so it's kind of a cooking experience versus engineering the engineer might look at the temperatures on either side and think oh this is the best way to get even temps but in terms of cooking characteristics it's not the best way to get off awesome cooking characteristics top down heat even cooking for a large part of the grate and so this is easily fixed by taking out that baffle you cut these little spot welds on either side wiggle that baffle back and forth until the spot welds up here next to the Firebox pop and then you take it out and you never look back now add to that the fact that forcing that hot gas to go down before it can go across the grate and out the stack slows airflow and you have kind of a double problem there you have the hot spot right in the middle of the grate and it doesn't want to draw air as well because you're trying to make gases do things that they don't want to do first of all the hot gases won't arise in this case with an Offset Smoker we're trying to make those hot gases go horizontal which they don't love to do but well of course I'm personifying podcasts they don't actually have will or emotions or anything but bear with me here this is kind of how I used to teach chemistry this ion wants to bond with this you know okay but I hope you understand what I'm saying here the hot gases will move sideways but they really don't want to be forced down that's really kind of like the last thing they want so it really inhibits airflow and you get uneven cooking you take out that baffle and you have a lot of those problems fixed now let's go on to somebody who does it a little bit different next up we have a Yoder Wichita and they're doing something in the same vein as the old country Brazos but I want to show you what they have going on I'm going to pull these grates out and we're going to take a look and then I'll tell you why I don't prefer it either let me preface this also by saying I have no affiliation with Yoder smokers I've never owned a Yoder smoker I have no relationship to the company in any form whatsoever I was actually interested in buying one a number of years back and ended up going with something else so instead of having just a baffle plate that forces the air down like we saw in the Brazos here they have kind of a heat diffuser plate the hot gases are forced down but then they're little holes for the gases to pop up and they get bigger on this end and they're smaller on this end to try to even out temps this system is another example of where engineers and Cooks might want different things so for the engineer looking at this they're seeing oh look at those even temperatures across the grate this is wonderful but for a cook it doesn't have the characteristics that you want ideally to be cooked in your barbecue because if you have a brisket say we're going to use a brisket as a test example here for all these if you have a brisket sitting on the grate then the heat is going to come from the bottom and I'm not trying to dry out the Meats out of my brisket I'm trying to have heat come from the top to render the fat on the top side now of course some heat will go to the top and there's going to be some turbulence and air movement but all in all this evens out temperatures but all in all this doesn't render fat and cook barbecue in the best way possible now these are very good smokers I'm not trying to dog The Smokers they're beautiful you can make tremendously good food with these but we're talking about very good versus ideal here we have the Franklin Barbecue Pit which gives us a third example of how to deal with those gases that come from the Firebox into the cook chamber they don't use a baffle that faces down they don't use a heat management system like they do in the Yoder smokers let's open this up and take a look wow this season beautifully okay right here we just have a flat metal plate and so rather than forcing the air down it kind of forces the air over and then the hot gases come up here they go to the top of the chamber and then move across the grate before there's a low pressure because of the stack and it pulls those hot gases down so if we look at the outside of this smoker we can see where the heat gets distributed so let me close this back up again we just seasoned this thing where is the oil that was on the outside the darkest right here okay there's nothing here because of that plate right and then the hot gases come out and then they go up and guess where all the black is it's all up here and then they travel across and then they get pulled down so let's take a look inside one more time and talk about what the airflow does so the hot gas has come out here they travel up to the top of the chamber they get drawn across they get pulled down which means that from here to the end of the grate is great barbecue weather brisket weather you might say and we use this over the weekend and it did actually a really really nice job there are a lot of things to really commend this Franklin pit it's beautiful I mean it works very simply very easily you don't have to have a lot of experience to get a good product out of it but if there's one thing I could change I would change this from what it is to what's in my thousand gallon pit because now by experience I realized this is the way to go so if I build a pit in the future it's going to have the very same feature because the difference between what that thousand gallon has and what my thousand gallon has is night and day in terms of how it cooks and all this discussion brings us to the feature that's on the thousand gallon smoker that somebody is going to win again you can click on the link in the description and enter It Ends Tonight so if you're thinking about it Now's the Time so the feature that that thing has is rather than a baffle plate rather than nothing instead what it has is a scoop that sends all the hot gases to the top of the chamber now first let me caveat this with the downside that if you have an upper rack it's not going to work okay because on the top of the chamber is going to be nuclear hot right there so it's not going to be a successful way to deal with the heat so if you only have a bottom rack which I think you get more consistency by only having one rack at one level but that's besides the point but it shoots those gases up and then it moves across the chamber and then out the stack and what it does is it makes 100 of the Great Space usable because that scoop does two things one is directs all those hot gases up obviously it's going to protect what's right next to the Firebox the second thing is it blocks all the radiant heat since it's a scoop like this all the radiant heat from the fire itself that will oftentimes burn things that are right next to the Firebox gets blocked because there's a piece of metal in the way so you've avoided the radiant heat and you're protecting everything from the super intense convective heat with that scoop and so you can line up briskets all the way from the stack to the Firebox and use the entirety of the grate and you get even cooking characteristics now in that thousand gallon pit if you try to cook real low like 200 degrees then the stack end is hotter than right next to the Firebox so if you're shooting for 200 on average at the stack it might be 215 right at the Firebox like 12 feet distance is maybe 185 but once you start Really Cooking say you know 225 it starts to really even out it might have five degrees difference once you get to 250 all four of those gauges 250 250 250 250 275 the exact same thing 275 275 275 275 300 the same thing so we used it to cook ribs with Evan Leroy and we got great color tremendous cooking characteristics there I took it to Kansas City and I cooked I think it was 28 briskets on that pit phenomenal I can't be happier with how that thing cooked because we have even heating all the way across all the heat is coming from the top and going to the fat side of the brisket so we don't have to model the m-o-t-t-l-e by the way we don't have to model the fat side of the brisket by going fat side down and dealing with heat coming up from underneath to render fat we have heat coming from the top convective heat that really renders the fat down really helps with bark formation and you have even cooking from one end of the thousand gallon smoker all the way to the other so any Offset Smoker I think would benefit from that apart from if you have a top rack and whatever's right next to the Firebox it's going to be really really hot but for that bottom rack where you have even cooking and where you're really putting your most priced cuts to get perfectly even cooking characteristics out of that you have to use some kind of scoop that protects everything you're trying to cook and when you invest so much time and energy into one of these Cooks you want it to turn out as good as it possibly can and so that I realized is tremendously helpful last thing I want to talk about how we get such even cooking it makes sense probably to most of you how the Heat's coming from the top and then coming down and rendering the fat really well but if you think of this as kind of holding the heat you actually use a damper on your smoker to even out the temperature because the heat kind of backs up and fills in and that's why you can read 250 250 250 250 across the whole length of the grate on that thousand gallon pit so I would highly encourage you guys to check it out to think about it I think Lone Star grills might have something that's pretty similar it might work the same way I have to check that out some more but it blew my mind how evenly that pit cooks and how how well it Cooks because it just did what it needed to do a buddy of mine Gunsmoke barbecue pits actually built a 500 gallon smoker where he has a hole in the top of the tank that makes up the Firebox that allows the heat to go directly up and blocks any kind of radiant heat and he gets really even cooking and everything is protected all along the bottom great on that thing so check it out I would encourage you guys to maybe do some modifications on your pit and let me know in the comments if you think well this is helpful I know you're totally wrong on that or you know what I think I might give this a shot so let me know if you enjoyed the video hit the like button down below don't forget to enter to win that thousand gallon pit if you're interested in it today is the last day it's over at midnight so go and check that out you can also follow me on Instagram Facebook and Twitter at mad scientists barbecue I'll see you guys next time bought it and we're gonna but I got to cook with it but there's an okay it has a and all of that discussion brings me to that thousand count so here we have a third example of how you can deal with the gases coming from Firebox so here we have the third example of how you can [Music] here we have a third example of me not being able to do this okay ready [Music] foreign

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 206,131

Keywords: offset smoker, barbecue, how to use an offset smoker, offset smoker fire management, offset smoker tips, using an offset smoker, bbq, offset smoker for beginners, offset smoker fire control, offset smoker temperature control, how to use offset smoker, offset smoker fire managment, offset smokers, brisket, baffle plate, smoker mods, stick burner, old country bbq pits, yoder smoker, yoder smokers, franklin pit, franklin bbq, texas bbq, texas barbecue, franklin bbq offset

Id: 7TR-1rrj_KA

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023