So while I was unable to do a direct comparison between a Mak cooked shoulder and a Weber kettle cooked shoulder, I was able to come to some conclusions. I feel like since I have easily put 50+ shoulders, 10+ packer briskets, over a 100 pounds of chicken, and among other things on the Mak, I feel like I know what my Mak smoked food tastes like lol. I also had a few family members and friends over who have tasted my Mak smoked bbq at weddings and other miscellaneous gatherings and they were able to taste the kettle smoked bbq today as well for the comparison.
One thing I want to make clear is that I always cook with as clean of a fire as possible on my
kettle. I want to see zero smoke coming out of my exhaust while the food is on with only short periods of time of TBS when new chunks catch or when I open or close the lid. Even still, while my BBQ on the kettle is not bitter, sometimes the smoke flavor is stale or sometimes it just feels like something is missing. Also the aroma in the air is different from what you would smell when next to a clean burning stick burner or pellet grill.
For that reason, during my week off this week I decided to research wood combustion, how different smoker designs influence wood combustion, differences in fuel sources and how they affect wood combustion, role of cooking chamber humidity and what influences cooking chamber humidity, and most importantly, listening to people much smarter than I am and how they run their smokers. Success leaves clues!
I decided to take my current method of smoking meat on charcoal smokers and grills and flip it upside down (literally). I decided to take a page from Harry Soo and place the wood chunks directly on the charcoal grate spaced out evenly and fill her up as much as I can to the cooking grate.
Now normally I use 1 fist size chunk of wood on top of the lump charcoal for pork shoulders and briskets. This would normally give a “moderately” smoked piece of meat that wasn’t bitter per say but not as clean as my Mak 1 star pellet smoker or my late stick burner I used to own.
What perplexed me with Harry Soo’s methodology when smoking meat however is how many chunks of wood he uses! I saw a forum post where he stated he uses 8 chunks of wood for briskets and pork shoulders and 6 chunks for ribs and chicken!
So when applying this method I decided to say “screw it” and loaded up 3 large wood chunks to play it somewhat safe which is 3 times what I normally use. I spaced the 3 wood chunks evenly across the charcoal grate and fill in unlit lump charcoal on top. I said to myself, if this screws up I’ll just give up on charcoal smoking and be a pellet head for the rest of my bbq life lol. I light a starter cube on top at one of the corners of the pile of coals and let it “fuse” across.
Now the reasons I chose this method is because of the inherent limitations of charcoal smokers which is too little airflow and a large yet cool fire. With limited airflow, comes smoldering wood. A little smoldering wood ain’t gonna ruin your BBQ but a lot will turn your meat black and cause heart burn and acid reflux!
There are three things going on with this set up that I feel makes it fool proof.
1. More oxygen to the wood. I feel that having wood on top of the charcoal obstructs delivery of oxygen to the wood through the intake. I want the wood on the charcoal grate getting direct delivery of oxygen from the intake at the bottom of the grill.
2. The wood gets a chance to preheat prior to ignition limiting “dirty” smoke production when the initial chunk lights off as well as all other successive chunks afterwards.
3. The smoke from the wood must pass through HOT charcoal prior to entering the cook chamber to flavor the food. I believe this cleanses the smoke. This is similar to the design of the Dutch oven pot you see people talk about with kamados as well as the science behind the Karubeque smoker. If you haven’t an idea of what I’m talking about look into it! It’s pretty cool!
However, this is not the reasoning that Harry Soo gives for why he does this method. He says it allows the wood to smolder more. Personally, that wasn’t my experience. My wood chunks for the first time (in ever lol) were flaming up. I always use to think that the only smokers that can ignite wood were pellet and stick burners. This wasn’t one of those scenarios where I left the lid open for >10 seconds either and the wood went from a smolder to a flame. It was flaming up as I was opening the lid. Not a huge flame mind you but I could see the flame reaching through the pile of white hot lump to the cooking grate. I feel this is due to increased oxygen delivery to the wood allowing the wood to go from stage 2 wood combustion (pyrolysis) to stage 3 wood combustion (burning bush).
So how was the results? Not what I expected! Despite tripling the amount of wood I use, the smoke flavor was lighter than it normally was with just 1 chunk of wood! I also had no stale flavors either. It was very similar to my Mak 1 star and stickburner in terms of smoke characteristics.
Something that is also interesting is how quickly I got the invisible smoke I shoot for. Normally it takes approximately 1 hour after getting up to temp before I get invisible smoke. This time I got invisible smoke within 5-10 minutes of getting up to temp. Could the invisible smoke I was getting before just be the wood turning into charcoal?
Also, something else that was interesting is that even when new chunks were lit, the smoke continued to remain invisible. The only time I got thin blue smoke this entire experience was when lighting the smoker and when opening and closing the lid to inspect the meat and coals. Otherwise it was just invisible combustion gases the entire time.
Ok... now onto the results. Everyone (6 people included) unanimously voted for the Weber kettle pork shoulder (including myself) Mind you, everyone in attendance has had my Mak smoked shoulders.
Everyone had specific reasons why but I decided to focus my follow up questions specifically on smoke flavor. Everyone said the Mak smoked shoulders were smokier but they preferred this smoke flavor. I was also in agreement that the Mak smoked shoulders were smokier as well. No one could really say why (including myself) the the smoke from the kettle was better. The Mak, like all pellet grills, produces perfect smoke flavor.
My wife said this pork shoulder reminded her of the pork shoulder smoked on the stickburner down in Galax Virginia at a BBQ contest we decided to attend. This team was handing out free samples to try to win people choice. I believe they won! This was approximately 2 years ago and she still holds onto the memory of that pork shoulder sample being the best bbq she has had. I took that as one heck of a compliment!
After reading through professor Jeff Blonder’s work on genuine ideas I came to the conclusion that people in general crave these invisible combustion gases. Not the ones you light on fire after eating tacos and burritos with friends but the ones from charcoal and wood combustion! I’m of the belief now that these are the main drivers of flavor for BBQ. Anything visible coming out of the stack is just solid particulate that will eventually land and stick on your food. A little adds flavor but too much will turn your food bitter and acrid.
I want to be clear that this is nothing new and people have been lighting their charcoal fires like this for a long time. I just personally have a hard time adopting new methodologies if I don’t understand WHY I need to do something or if the reasons given to me don’t add up in my head. I decided to try to wrap my head around why this method is widely successful for others so I could justify trying it myself. I am not saying my reasoning is correct by the way. It’s just reasoning that makes sense to me based on what I know to be true.
Anyway just a few thoughts and rambling. If you made it this far then cheers and happy Sunday!
One thing I want to make clear is that I always cook with as clean of a fire as possible on my
kettle. I want to see zero smoke coming out of my exhaust while the food is on with only short periods of time of TBS when new chunks catch or when I open or close the lid. Even still, while my BBQ on the kettle is not bitter, sometimes the smoke flavor is stale or sometimes it just feels like something is missing. Also the aroma in the air is different from what you would smell when next to a clean burning stick burner or pellet grill.
For that reason, during my week off this week I decided to research wood combustion, how different smoker designs influence wood combustion, differences in fuel sources and how they affect wood combustion, role of cooking chamber humidity and what influences cooking chamber humidity, and most importantly, listening to people much smarter than I am and how they run their smokers. Success leaves clues!
I decided to take my current method of smoking meat on charcoal smokers and grills and flip it upside down (literally). I decided to take a page from Harry Soo and place the wood chunks directly on the charcoal grate spaced out evenly and fill her up as much as I can to the cooking grate.
Now normally I use 1 fist size chunk of wood on top of the lump charcoal for pork shoulders and briskets. This would normally give a “moderately” smoked piece of meat that wasn’t bitter per say but not as clean as my Mak 1 star pellet smoker or my late stick burner I used to own.
What perplexed me with Harry Soo’s methodology when smoking meat however is how many chunks of wood he uses! I saw a forum post where he stated he uses 8 chunks of wood for briskets and pork shoulders and 6 chunks for ribs and chicken!
So when applying this method I decided to say “screw it” and loaded up 3 large wood chunks to play it somewhat safe which is 3 times what I normally use. I spaced the 3 wood chunks evenly across the charcoal grate and fill in unlit lump charcoal on top. I said to myself, if this screws up I’ll just give up on charcoal smoking and be a pellet head for the rest of my bbq life lol. I light a starter cube on top at one of the corners of the pile of coals and let it “fuse” across.
Now the reasons I chose this method is because of the inherent limitations of charcoal smokers which is too little airflow and a large yet cool fire. With limited airflow, comes smoldering wood. A little smoldering wood ain’t gonna ruin your BBQ but a lot will turn your meat black and cause heart burn and acid reflux!
There are three things going on with this set up that I feel makes it fool proof.
1. More oxygen to the wood. I feel that having wood on top of the charcoal obstructs delivery of oxygen to the wood through the intake. I want the wood on the charcoal grate getting direct delivery of oxygen from the intake at the bottom of the grill.
2. The wood gets a chance to preheat prior to ignition limiting “dirty” smoke production when the initial chunk lights off as well as all other successive chunks afterwards.
3. The smoke from the wood must pass through HOT charcoal prior to entering the cook chamber to flavor the food. I believe this cleanses the smoke. This is similar to the design of the Dutch oven pot you see people talk about with kamados as well as the science behind the Karubeque smoker. If you haven’t an idea of what I’m talking about look into it! It’s pretty cool!
However, this is not the reasoning that Harry Soo gives for why he does this method. He says it allows the wood to smolder more. Personally, that wasn’t my experience. My wood chunks for the first time (in ever lol) were flaming up. I always use to think that the only smokers that can ignite wood were pellet and stick burners. This wasn’t one of those scenarios where I left the lid open for >10 seconds either and the wood went from a smolder to a flame. It was flaming up as I was opening the lid. Not a huge flame mind you but I could see the flame reaching through the pile of white hot lump to the cooking grate. I feel this is due to increased oxygen delivery to the wood allowing the wood to go from stage 2 wood combustion (pyrolysis) to stage 3 wood combustion (burning bush).
So how was the results? Not what I expected! Despite tripling the amount of wood I use, the smoke flavor was lighter than it normally was with just 1 chunk of wood! I also had no stale flavors either. It was very similar to my Mak 1 star and stickburner in terms of smoke characteristics.
Something that is also interesting is how quickly I got the invisible smoke I shoot for. Normally it takes approximately 1 hour after getting up to temp before I get invisible smoke. This time I got invisible smoke within 5-10 minutes of getting up to temp. Could the invisible smoke I was getting before just be the wood turning into charcoal?
Also, something else that was interesting is that even when new chunks were lit, the smoke continued to remain invisible. The only time I got thin blue smoke this entire experience was when lighting the smoker and when opening and closing the lid to inspect the meat and coals. Otherwise it was just invisible combustion gases the entire time.
Ok... now onto the results. Everyone (6 people included) unanimously voted for the Weber kettle pork shoulder (including myself) Mind you, everyone in attendance has had my Mak smoked shoulders.
Everyone had specific reasons why but I decided to focus my follow up questions specifically on smoke flavor. Everyone said the Mak smoked shoulders were smokier but they preferred this smoke flavor. I was also in agreement that the Mak smoked shoulders were smokier as well. No one could really say why (including myself) the the smoke from the kettle was better. The Mak, like all pellet grills, produces perfect smoke flavor.
My wife said this pork shoulder reminded her of the pork shoulder smoked on the stickburner down in Galax Virginia at a BBQ contest we decided to attend. This team was handing out free samples to try to win people choice. I believe they won! This was approximately 2 years ago and she still holds onto the memory of that pork shoulder sample being the best bbq she has had. I took that as one heck of a compliment!
After reading through professor Jeff Blonder’s work on genuine ideas I came to the conclusion that people in general crave these invisible combustion gases. Not the ones you light on fire after eating tacos and burritos with friends but the ones from charcoal and wood combustion! I’m of the belief now that these are the main drivers of flavor for BBQ. Anything visible coming out of the stack is just solid particulate that will eventually land and stick on your food. A little adds flavor but too much will turn your food bitter and acrid.
I want to be clear that this is nothing new and people have been lighting their charcoal fires like this for a long time. I just personally have a hard time adopting new methodologies if I don’t understand WHY I need to do something or if the reasons given to me don’t add up in my head. I decided to try to wrap my head around why this method is widely successful for others so I could justify trying it myself. I am not saying my reasoning is correct by the way. It’s just reasoning that makes sense to me based on what I know to be true.
Anyway just a few thoughts and rambling. If you made it this far then cheers and happy Sunday!
Last edited by a moderator:
