Nostalgia


 
A

Andy Harrington

TVWBB Member
Not to get teary eyed or mushy but I miss the old days. I miss starting the fire on my 18.5 " wsmc the night before for pulled pork, before Aaron Franklin's name ran synomous with brisket. When you were nothing without a maverick wireless thermometer. I even kinda miss getting up to tend the fire and the solitude of a brisk night's air. I miss predicting the temp and adjusting the vents accordingly. That being said I'm as guilty as anyone of using a temperature controller, the ugly whir of the fan drowning out the sizzle of fat hitting the water pan. The need to not even mess with charcoal on my smokefire. I miss the journey, to me it made the destination a little tastier.
 
While I do knot have any fancy gadgets, I did at one time own a pellet grill. I feel what you are saying, when something comes off the dinner plate and it blows you away and you put 10 hours of sweat and monitoring and all that stuff into it......the sense of accomplishment......the satisfaction of it all really comes into play. For me over the past 12 months it has been seeing the MRS enjoying the fruits of my labor, all while missing serving treats to my family and my friends..........which now has been happening again and is going to happen again Saturday with that taco bowl thread I made earlier with Case's taco bowls. Sounds like a 4.5 hour rib cook on a kettle is what you need.
 
I'm old school myself. I find once I can do something the old school way, I'm ready to let technology help with the process. I'm getting too old to be woke up every hour during an overnight cook.
An Auber temp control doesn't take away, for me at least, the enjoyment of the results.
 
Joan said:
I guess some of you do see what I have been trying to say here all along. "The enjoyment of the results". But, don't you think you will get more enjoyment of the results if you did EVERYTHING? I'm talking about using store bought sauce, store bought spice rubs, etc. That is why I keep pushing all these recipes on you to make your own. Or you don't have to use a recipe. Wing it, make up your own. When you do, you can sit back and THEN take all the credit. ;)
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I would say I was old school, yet I wasn't an A student.

I guess I started down the gadget path when I bought PB 820. The fan is louder than I expected, and the preset temp settings are inaccurate but the smoke that it produces at low temps are exactly what I was looking for. I've learned my way around its limitations and I like it for medium length slow cooks, however the noise of the fan is a drawback and I don't think I want to annoy my neighbors running an overnight cook with it.

I recently bought the smoke X4 and Billows for the BGE and while I've only done three cooks so far, it is a game changer for me. the longest cook I've done was three hours, but it truly was set-and-forget on the third cook. The first two I was looking at it every few mins because it was new, but I didn't have to fiddle with things. The third cook (last night) I didn't even power on the remote. It was set to 250 and I waited for a 3 hour timer to go off. I walked past it a couple of times and saw it was within a couple of degrees of the target temp, and the fan was not running and there were some thin wisps of smoke leaking out so I just kept walking.

I can say I do expect I will enjoy the results much more on the BGE, and I am starting to think what I might replace the PB 820 with as I'm not sure how long it will last.
 
I enjoyed my WSM until my health started going to hell. The meds in the winter prevented me and still does being outside in the cold. So chasing temps became a chore. Also for the past four summers the ban on charcoal only allowed me to use my gasser. I upgraded my Maverick to a Smoke, although the Maverick worked fine it's now a back up.
I finally decided to try a pellet grill, the set and forget appealed to me. It's been wonderful I can go out and fire it up and be back in the house in about five minuets with the Smoke I don't need to go out and check like I did before. I bought a Camp Chef with just a basic controller no wi fi I use my smoke to monitor the cooks. No software or other problems to deal with, so far it's been faultless. The good old days are gone for me, but I still get to play with fire and with good results, so I'm a happy camper.
 
This has nothing to do with grilling, but I miss the good ol' days when I watched a TV game show with celebrities I KNEW WHO THE HECK THEY WERE. (sorry, vent over)
 
After being very vocal on the forums about being anti-ATC( I couldn't resist the gadget and bought a Billows for my Thermoworks Signals. I still use it occasionally but I found it really took me too far out of what I enjoyed about barbecuing. I've gone the complete opposite direction and cook on my offset mostly. The only gadget I use is my Thermopen and a Tel-Tru Analog thermometer mounted on the smoker. Honestly, I can pretty well dial in my WSM without an ATC, the ATC just makes it even stupid easier. There's certain cooks, though, that I don't find that enjoyable like warm-smoking bacon where I just don't want to baby-sit the smoker at all. For things, like bacon or sausage where you aren't even really going for a clean smoke profile, the ATC and the WSM work great.
 
I think an ATC used with a WSM makes the cook/smoke pretty much bullet proof, however I believe that if your using a stick burner there is very little benefit gained.
 
I used to work at a steak house when I was in high school in the 70’s.
We didn’t have any fancy gadget.
No thermometers or anything like that.
We had to quickly learn to squish test our steaks to determine if it was going to be served rare through well done.
I still do that on my tri tips most of the time.
 
Summer BBQs as a kid were great! Usually they were hosted by my late uncle, who had a huge backyard at his summer home. My father would assist. The grills they always used were similar to the grill pictured below. (Note the vintage reclining lawn chair, too). The grate height was adjustable via a lever at the bottom - that I remember clearly. How they fed an army of us with such a small grill surface area is beyond me. And the evening always ended off with toasting marshmallows - which is exactly what we do when I grill for my grandchildren.

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Joan said:
Would love to hear from more members.
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Joan, I built a gargantuan smoker using an ATC a few years ago. No, it's not done yet. I've found that I am completely and utterly spoiled by the ability to fire it up, load the food, and walk away, knowing that it'll run gracefully, and tell me when things happen (or need to happen.) Consider over the weekend..... I fired it up late Friday afternoon, loaded the food in mid-evening, stoked it just before midnight..... and it just ran and ran while the temperature dropped to mid single digits with a 10-20 mph wind blowing and some light snow. With my old leaky horizontal offset, I'd have been tending that every hour or so, and really not getting any sleep, along with worrying about whether I was going to get something edible at the end.
 
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