My Barbecue Adventure!

I have been smoking meat since 2020 just before I married my wife. My wife and I used to seek out various barbecue restaurants and steakhouses to eat at. In the time leading up to our wedding, we had to “buckle down” our finances and save for the “big day”. One of the first, but hardest, things that we had to cut back on was going out to eat. We had to drop one of our absolute favorite things to do as a couple. This made learning how to grill a necessity.

I went to Walmart, bought the cheapest charcoal grill that they had ($20 at the time), and I got busy. Over the next couple of months, I grilled EVERYTHING. If it came into the house and was raw or had to be heated, I was grilling it. Steak, porkchops, chicken, pork loin, chuck roast, vegetables, frozen pizza, etc… it didn’t matter what it was, I was grilling it.

One day, my wife and I were talking and had come to the conclusion that the grilled food was good, but we were still missing one key element to our favorite dishes… low-and-slow smoke. That was when I decided to set-out on a mission to figure out how to low-and-slow smoke on a 16″x16″ charcoal grill.

I tried everything from building a charcoal ring around the outside of the grill to piling it in the middle and cooking on the outside edges of the grill. One night, I went out to start the grill and while I was watching the charcoal start to light and smoke, I got the idea that changed it all for us.

Up to this point, I had gotten the food to taste okay, but I still just could not quite get that smokehouse taste. The idea that dawned on me was to wrap a piece of aluminum foil around one of the rods that formed the grill grate and weigh it down with a few briquettes. I started my fire on one side of the aluminum foil, situated the grate, and placed my marinated chicken on the other side, but on top of the grate. This allowed me to have a protective barrier between my food and the heat source. Believe it or not, to that point, that chicken turned out to be the best dish that I had done on the grill yet, and because it was primarily cooked by the heat of the smoke, I had successfully smoked my first dish.

As time went on, I continued to use this method and just tweak the setup a little bit here and there. About 3 months after we got married (January of 2021), we had saved enough for me to go get a relatively cheap smoker. I got the Oklahoma Joe’s Highland standard flow offset smoker. While I was learning how to use this smoker, I did not have a good source of split wood suitable for smoking with, so I used a combination of charcoal and wood chunks that you can buy from Walmart.

While using this smoker and method, I began experimenting with making my own rubs, sauces, and marinades. In August of 2023, I started my very own mobile barbecue business. My first venue was small festival in a small town about thirty minutes away from home. I went and setup the day before and smoked all night. I acquired an electric smoker from Facebook marketplace. This was one of the best decisions that I had ever made. This allowed extra capacity for smoking, and it allowed me to have a good holding cabinet to regulate temperatures throughout the day. The first event was a success, and it made me want more. I continued booking events, catering, and setting up for various vending opportunities in the surrounding communities.

Since then, I have experimented with pellet smokers, and I do not personally care for them, but there are some tricks that you can use with them to get, not the same, but similar results. I also experimented with cooking over open fire in my backyard and with cooking in the kitchen.

With the versatility that I have developed, I wanted to share information and inspiration with other fanatics whether they be backyard pitmasters or professional pitmasters, and that is what The Pitmaster Post is all about.

I encourage you to fill out the contact form and watch on Facebook for when we launch the “The Pitmaster Post Community” group.

On the community group, we will share our blogs, like-minded blogs, and plug some of our favorite restaurants. We also encourage our followers to share their experiences with us and create conversation to try to help one another along the way.

Our future blog posts will contain information about equipment purchasing decisions, recipes, wood selections, pellet variations, information about different cuts of meat, and many more tips and tricks for growing your skills in barbecue.

Thank you!