What’s the best way to set up your grill or smoker? The secret is to have temperature control, and for grills, that almost always means using a 2-zone setup. For smokers, the secret is to get a small hot fire that makes clean “blue” smoke rather that billowy white smoke. And yes, you can use a plain old grill, gas or charcoal, as a smoker.
Improve your recipes and make the best BBQ possible with this one essential concept: temperature control. The secret? 2 zone grilling setup, a.k.a. an indirect grilling setup!
Get the most out of your charcoal grill by setting up 2 heat zones, direct and indirect. This set up allows you to add wood chunks to the coals for smoke, to cook low and slow barbecued ribs and pork shoulder, and to better control your temperature. It also helps prevent flareups and burnt food!
You can set up a gas grill to get excellent smoke roasted barbecue if you know how. Here's how gas grills work, the best setups, and how to maintain them.
Find out how to setup and modify inexpensive offset smokers such as the Brinkmann Pitmaster, Brinkmann Smoke'N Pit Professional (a.k.a. SNPP), and Char-Broil Silver Smoker to get the best possible BBQ with the least possible expense.
Learn about thermodynamics: the basis of all cooking! Find out how heat transference works by conduction, convection, radiation, induction, and infrared heat in your grill, bbq, and smoker.
Learn all about wood smoke and how it adds flavor to BBQ. Find out whether you should be using wood chunks, chips, pellets, logs, or sawdust in your cooker. Discover the truth behind the claim that different woods have different flavors.
Ever wonder how barbecue charcoal is made? Here's an inside look at the manufacturing process for pillow shaped charcoal briquets, hardwood lump charcoal, bone charcoal, and other forms of charcoal such as binchotan. We also explain which kind of charcoal is best and how to use it.
Getting ready to fire up for BBQ season? Check out our must-have checklist of tips to kick things off right. You'll find out how to get rid of built-up grease, clean the grill grates, and improve your cooker's overall performance so you're barbecued food will taste its best all season long.
Keep your barbecue grill clean. Greasy grill grates make food taste bad and gunk on the inside of a grill can reduce heat transference. Here's how to clean and maintain your grill.
Mold in your BBQ grill is a common problem. Learn how to quickly and safely remove mold that has built up on your grill grates or elsewhere in your grill or smoker. We also show you how to prevent mold from building up in your cooker in the first place.
Calibrate your cooker. There is often dust and grease under the hood from the factory on new grills and smokers. Here's how to prepare your cooker with a dry run so you can control its temperature when it's showtime.
Lid up or lid down? It's a question that comes up on the patio as often as it does in the bathroom. Answer: it depends. Sometimes you want to cook with the grill lid on, and sometimes you want it wide open. Read on to find out why.
Discover the secrets to grilling with wood and mastering campfire cooking. Once you cook with wood and enjoy the high heat and incredible smoke flavors, you will want to cook this way again and again.
Here's everything you need to know about smoking meat with wood logs, including working with different styles of barbecue pits and wood ovens and using different types of wood logs.
Here are the tested tools and tips to make the most of your Weber Smokey Mountain, arguably the most popular and best rated bullet style smoker on the market. This comprehensive guide covers everything from seasoning the smoker to proper fire building techniques as well as reviews of the top products for the WSM.
Take a look at the Pit Barrel Cooker (PBC), an amazing smoker and grill. We give you all the tips, tricks, and techniques you need to get the best bbq out of it.
How to build a barbecue pit for cooking a whole hog from concrete block (cinder block), including illustrated plans with dimensions and various designs
Learn some nifty tricks for insulating and protecting your cooker so you can beat the cold, rain, snow, and wind. These handy tips will keep you grilling and smoking successfully on any cooker, at any time, in any weather.
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Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we donโt have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.
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2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.
3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50ยฐF so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.
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High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, weโll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!
Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we donโt have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.
Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please donโt think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.
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1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.
2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.
3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50ยฐF so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.
4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.
5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.
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