Get Your Grill On

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.