Question about wood burning smokers

[Lee Morris]

This is really just a theoretical question since all I smoke on is my WSM, but I was wondering, so here goes.

I was reading a post recently about how much smoke wood to add with your charcoal and people were worried about "over-smoking" the meat and having too much smoke flavor. Well what about the big cookers that use nothing but wood as a fire source. Why is the meat from them not always "over-smoked"?

Just curious.

 

[Ken Nelson]

I've always found over-smoked to be a bit of a misnomer. Food that I've heard other people called over-smoked is to my mind the result of a cook eoither losing control of a pit or purposely maintaining a dirty fire under the assumption that cranking out a lot of smoke equals great smoke flavor.

The key is fire control. A pitmaster worth his No. 7 on any pit uses a relatively small, hot yet clean burning fire as a heat source that also puts out very little visible smoke.

A large hot fire throttled back by choking off most of its oxygen supply in any pit will eventually slow down to a more desirable level but it will put out a lot of foul smoke from incomplete combustion as most of the flames and coals die out.

That's my one-fiftieth of a dollar's worth.

KDN

 

[Dan Wicker]

I've wondered about the same thing. One of my Raichlen cookbooks suggests pure hardwood as a fuel source - load it up in your chimney the same as charcoal.

 

[r benash]

When you are doing an all wood cook, you are not loading up a wood fire and throwing the food on right away. You start the fire let it reduce to coals, load the food and then add "sticks" or logs to keep the fire going, manage the heat, and the amount of smoke.

I've done all wood cooks in my cheap horizontal with side fire box many times. You control the fire to get a more or less clear/blue tint smoke. You keep the fire going by adding wood as you need to, but you also can toss on chunks for diffrent smoke blends or flavors.

Often when adding wood you will get a heavier smoke load until the added fuel catches well. Most time it evens out quickly if it's a problem I would lift the SFB door until the wood was consumed well and creating less heavy smoke.

A lot of folks keep a separate fire going creating coals, and shovel or add them to the fire instead of just tossing the additional wood in.

 

[Tom Chips]

A good video to watch called " Smokestack Lightning" shows tons of various methods that people use to Q'. They had an interesting part where someone talked about how inefficient barbequeing was, when it was done over wood coals. The pitmaster would burn hardwood logs in a large vertical cylinder and then shovel the coals at the bottom under his pit. Very little visible smoke was seen.

So I imagine it has to do with completely burning the fuel.