smoking/grilling parents?

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bluewhisper

Master of the Pit
Original poster
OTBS Member
Apr 1, 2014
3,587
455
Columbus Ohio
How many of you grew up in a home with a grill or smoker? Have you built on lessons learned from your parents or older relatives?

I remember my parents having some kind of grill since we moved into this house in 1964. At first we had a charcoal grill with a big hood similar to this design


Later we got a big Weber kettle that lasted for decades. (that's my father with a friend)


We had a cheap hibachi for a while, it didn't last long.

We had a Little Chief electric smoker but we didn't use it much


My parents grilled steaks, sish kebabs, and burgers - I still use that same Chop-Rite #10 grinder - but they very seldom grilled chicken, and almost never pork. My mother was completely convinced that pork cannot be grilled because it dries out.

(Mom had her quirks, anyway)


JUST KIDDING

Another thing from back then, backyard fireplaces were common. They seemed to disappear in the 70s and 80s. These days they're popular again as big and fancy setups, but back then they were home-made and sometimes crude, sort of along these lines:


Ah the memories of the smell of charcoal lighter fluid. Squirt it on the briquettes and wait to let it soak in before lighting. But one neighbor would use gasoline, and he'd have a roaring fire, no kidding, flames five or six feet tall.

As it happens, my parents are now ashes. And I smell like smoke.
 
Sounds like we had the same parents. Same set of grills even.

My dad didn't like lighter fluid, so he used an electric starter. Sort of a big, looped element with a handle. Still took forever to get those coals going. And I was an impatient kid. He did smoke salmon or steelhead once or twice in the Little Chief, but that was it for smoked food in our house.
 
Yes, we switched over to the electric starters as well. Kind of like an electric oven heating element on a handle. I still have one hanging in the garage. I just took a look at it and it doesn't say how much power it pulls but it must be huge.

These days I use a hatchet to split straight wood down to big matchsticks, and use a propane torch to ignite, cheap and clean.

An odd note - my mother hated the smell of wood smoke. That's from the days after WWII when she lived in a "displaced persons" camp in Germany, very tough times in barracks heated by wood stoves. She had a story about once getting a Red Cross ham from America, a huge treat, but it was glazed in sugar - yuk! They were trying to wash the sugar off of it.
 
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When I first saw the title to this post I thought you were looking for recipes!

My dad wasn't a big outdoor cooking guy, mainly charred chicken a couple times a year.
 
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