I found a great place for restaurant equipment in Kasas City. They have everything you see in a restaurant from service to kitchen. Its open to the public, so you can go in to browse and shop. During a recent trip I purchased some pizza screens, a deep dish pizza pan, strainer, tongs, and long handled thingy to fish items from hot oil or boiling water. The whole works cost just $22 with tax.

Index Restaurant Supply
816.842.9122
521 Main St
Kansas City, MO 64105

Last November while at an auction with Randy, I picked up an old metal cabinet for $4. Originally my intention was to use it as a router table in my shop. When Randy saw it he said, “BBQ Cabinet?” Well, that changed my plans right there. Here is the before picture.

The metal cabinet has been sanded, rust proofed, painted and new hardware added. The final step will be a maple butcher block top with swing up extension table. I’ll use the cabinet to prep before cooking and slice meat for our entry boxes.

The best kind of wood is free wood.  This is true in wood turning and BBQ.  This last fall my wife drove past a neighborhood house that was having a huge sugar maple tree cut down.  The huge logs were laying in the driveway with a sign: Free Maple Wood!  I came home with my truck and tailer full.  Four months later, I’ve started to split it for BBQ.  Maple has a sweet and smooth flavor and works well paired with Oak, Hickory, or Pecan.

Free wood is great, but splitting it with an axe or maul isn’t.  Mechanical wood splitters cost a lot of money and take up a lot of space.  For the backyard cook, its a dilemma.  A few years ago I found a tool that fit my wallet and my garage.  This splitter uses a 10 ton hydraulic jack with two levers.  One lever is set up to move the jack fast while the other moves the jack slower, but with more torque.  Both are necessary.  It looks like a lot of work, but I can split a nice pile of seasoned wood like in the picture in about a half hour’s time.  There’s no way you could do this with an axe or maul.  The price tag: $99.  I’ve seen my money out of this tool several times over with the money I save on finding my own wood and not having to rent a large hydraulic splitter.

Most serious grillers are replacing their grill grate scrubber once a year. They clog up with grease and the wire brush erodes quickly it seems. You could try a new grate scrubber each year and never try every one of them on the market. Some work well and some not so much. The grate cleaner I recommend and use myself is this one from Weber. It has a long handle to keep your knuckles out of the fire. The wire brush end gets between the bars of the grill grate. It is obviously made for the Weber kettle grills as the spacing on the wire brush is the exact spacing of the bars on the kettle grate. This scrubber works just as well on the porcelan or stainless steel grates of a gas grill as well. The price was $10 from The Home Depot. Ten dollars a year isn’t going to break the budget.

I’ve been considering some potential mods to my Traeger 075 pellet cookers to control temperature spikes and maybe reduce fuel consumption a bit. Here are some thoughts on mods that I hope to try this weekend despite the ice/snow storm.

Stack Inversion
The stack on the 075 is bolted on the end of the pit. Removal of a copule bolts allows you to invert the stack to point down. This restricts flow and doesn’t send so much heat and smoke out of the pit so fast. This one that Dr BBQ had shared from someone he had heard try this. One negative to watch for will be any moisture that may collect in the stack and drip down onto my deck.

Stack Pie Plate Baffle
The stack isn’t adjustable, so I was thinking an aluminum pie plate baffle on the stack might accomplish similar if not more potential restriction than the stack inversion. You could even cut up an beer can and create an aluminum baffle that way, too.

Pizza Stone Mod
I saw this on a site discussing smoker mods where a pizza stone like a water or sand pan would be to more evenly distribute heat from the heat source to across the cooking area. The fire source on the Traeger 075 is in the middle of the pit. The center of the cooking area tends to be a hot spot. I’d like to try a pizza stone on the metal base directly above the fire.

I’ll take pictures to better illustrate these ideas. For testing, I’ll use three temp probs placed on the left, center, and right of the grate. What I hope to see is fewer temp swings, smaller range in those temp differences, and more even cooking at different locations within the pit.

Here’s a picture of the pizza mod that I found on a different site. This isn’t my smoker, its apparently a Klose.

Several weeks ago, I found a new Dexter cleaver for $5 in the Ambroise bargain bins. The edge and steel were in great shape, but the handle looked like someone’s dog had been gnawing on it. In one evening, I took the knife down to my wood shop and made a new handle out of a piece of curly maple and walnut dowels. This will be a great knife to put in a metal cabinet that I’m refurbishing with a butcher block top into a moble BBQ workstation at contests. Will feature that in another article.

Though it took him two extra days, Santa delivered the one gift I wanted this Christmas. I say it took a couple extra days because the Denver blizzard held up the USPS.

A Thermopen is a food thermometer that is super fast. It reads in 1-2 seconds, much faster than the spring loaded, so called intant read dial thermometers. It is extremely accurate and has a digital read out. Unfold the probe and measure the air temperature.

Thermopens come in several colors. Mine is red. I call them food thermomters because they aren’t just used to temp BBQ meats. Thermopens are used in various professional kitchens and bakeries. The thin probe is ideal for bakeries that don’t want huge holes in their breads. For barbeque cooks, like me, a quick read means your smoker doors aren’t open as long losing heat and smoke. If you’re looking, you ain’t cooking!

This Fall I decided that I needed a Barbeque smoker for use at home. The right equipment had to be legal at KCBS competitions. This meant no gas or electric heat source. It had to be something that wouldn’t require a lot of attention. I have two young sons and can’t sit outside watching my fire. The best location for it is outside my kitchen door, so I couldn’t take the risk of coals or embers hitting my wood deck. The best choice for me was a pellet cooker. The best known, and really only, name in backyard pellet cookers is Traeger. My choice was the Traeger 075.

Your first question may be what are pellets? Pellets are compressed pieces of wood that look like rabbit food. They are made of real wood and are very combustable. Just a small full palm of pellets can maintain a smoking chamber’s temperature. Pellets come in different “flavors” just like sticks of wood. You have oak, hickory, ash, alder, mesquite, pecan, apple, cherry, and others. Other flavors are also available like garlic and onion. Like stick wood, you can mix and match your flavors. My personal experience, which is the same as other pellet Barbequers I’ve talked to, is that difference in pellets in taste and smell is hard to determine. Meat color can be darker with cherry, apple, and pecan.

The Traeger pits use a hopper to hold the pellets and an auget to feed them to a small area in the center of the grill where they burn. The Traeger 075 in the picture above looks like a traditional Texas style offset smoker with a firebox to the left. That isn’t a firebox. Its the pellet hopper. The actual fire is in the center of the pit. A digital temperature control located outside of the pellet hopper has a dial where you set the desired temperature of your pit. At the lowest temp (about 170) you use a modest amount of fuel. The highest temp (about 425-450) uses pellets much more rapidly. Cooking at 225-250 degrees, I can run my pit for 12-14 hours on a full hopper of pellets.

My family’s experience with the smoker has been wonderful. It has been put to the test with all of your traditional BBQ cuts like whole brisket, spare ribs, pork butt, baby back ribs, and whole chickens. We even smoked our Thanksgiving turkey on it. Ease of use is a 10 out of 10. Auto ignition means that I can walk outside, set the controller to my desired temp and go back in to prep my meat. Within 5-10 minutes I can walk back outside to put the meat on and my pit is up to temp. As long as I have pellets in the hopper, I don’t have to touch the pit again. It doesn’t get easier than that. The food is great BBQ. The chicken is some of the best I’ve ever had. The pork chops are out of this world. My wife claims they were the best chops she’s ever had and she comes from a family of pork growers.

So is this real BBQ? Some BBQ purists believe that only wood, and maybe an occasional lump of charcoal, is real BBQ. Everything else… well, it isn’t. I like fire and wood. I understand and appreciate the tradition of it. I own a commerical wood/charcoal smoker that I use for BBQ competitions. Pellets are made of real wood. More importanly, I can’t be a ‘purist’ and feed my family BBQ every night for dinner. The Traeger 075 allows me to do that and still spend time with my family whom I love even more than Barbeque.