The PBC is essential and ugly drum smoker. It's a small 3p gallon drum. Charcoal for fuel. Vertical. Set your basket in the bottom then meat goes directly above it about a foot.
Put it this way. I've done 16+ hour smokes of pork butts on the WSM and this is how it usually goes:
Yes, but you're an idiot.
Care to elaborate?
Smoking meat has ONE purpose only. From the dawn of man shitting in the woods and buck skin thongs.....To preserve protein rich foods that would spoil quickly otherwise. That is it.
The company owner spend years designing the inlet and outlet apparently. Even tho its very simple. You set the inlet based upon your elevation and there is no actual exhaust stack or vent. At the top there are 4 holes around the sides. These are what hold the rods for hanging meat. A little smoke rolls out of each, that's your only vent. They say not to even monitor the internal chamber temp. Mine does fluctuate a times depending upon the wind. It runs hotter than a regular smoker, sometimes as much as 325. But I've never had shity food out of it. And I've never heard, or read, of someone unhappy with the results of their cooking.
That's not the only purpose. There's an equally valid secondary purpose, that being the preparation of cheaper and tougher cuts of meat that would be unpalatable to eat otherwise. The connective tissue found in a piece of pork butt (collagen) becomes delicious, flavorful gelatin when cooked "low and slow," as in a smoker. You're not smoking to the point of dehydration or preservation, you're smoking to the point of tenderness. The "low and slow" method is the necessary process to achieve this transition, no different than a pot roast or pork chops cooked in a Crock Pot. The smokey flavor is just a tasty by-product.
I've only done pork butts overnight, since they're much larger than any briskets I've done. Cooking two eight-pounders has always required at least 16 hours, so I start around 8pm, smoke until noon the next day, and then foil and towel the meat for one to four hours until whatever time the cookout is. I've had some mixed results with the meat itself, but the smoker has run consistently. I usually go to bed with the temp around 230, then wake up with it around 210 as the fuel starts to expire. If you've ever done pork butts, you know that the stubborn "plateau" phase varies wildly from cut to cut, and that's the only variation I've seen.
Regular "blue bag" Kingsford.
-wiki stuff for reference
When you're talking about an eight-pound hunk of pork, the phenol of the wood smoke doesn't permeate much past the surface of the meat. See the pink "smoke ring" in this piece of brisket.
When you're talking about an eight-pound hunk of pork, the phenol of the wood smoke doesn't permeate much past the surface of the meat. See the pink "smoke ring" in this piece of brisket.
Any wood fuel added more than a few hours into a smoke will do very little to penetrate the "bark" on the outside of the meat. This bark is formed by the Maillard reaction, created when the sugars used in barbecue rubs are heated and react with amino acids in the meat. This is the same reaction that creates bread crust or causes toasted marshmallows to turn brown.
Thus, there are three layers of barbecued meat. Bark, formed by the Maillard reaction; the smoke ring, formed by the the wood smoke, and the remainder of the meat. You're correct that the majority of the meat on the inside is essentially no different than it would be if it had been slow-cooked using any number of fuel sources, but then you'd lose the flavor of the bark and the smoke ring.
I think you're equating "cold smoking" (used since prehistoric times as a preservation technique) and "hot smoking," or "barbecue".
You can get a perfect football field in the month of November by installing plastic grass, too. Sometimes there's value in aesthetics and kinetics.
