[dtw]

I'll put in my thoughts from our email convo here for the benefit of the board, and add some thoughts on brisket and rubs:

Yes, it is often extremely economical to seek out local smoke (and cook) wood. You'll simply want to ensure that the wood is seasoned and dry.

The ultra-thin-gauge metal is the Achilles heel of the cheap smoker. At least in a dirt-cheap egg type, you get the advantage of lots of your heat passing up through the water bath and meat before disappearing through the thin walls, which simply cannot carry any kind of thermal load, preserving your fuel and extending your cook time. In a cheap offset smoker, the thermal dynamics are simply disastrous. You end up with food next to the firebox that is dried out and over-smoked, and food to the other side that is flavorless and raw. Further, due to less-efficient layout and massive amount of surface area of the cooker - especially when you compare surface area as a ratio against cooking surface - you just absolutely blaze through fuel. Also deduct from the equation the water bath. The water bath in the egg type cookers really serves to stabilize and smooth the internal temperature of the cooker, while serving the primary function of de-coupling the fire from the meat. This converts it from a kettle-type direct-heat fast cooker (barbecue grill, duh) to an indirect-heat slow cooker/smoker. What that means to you is that it idiot-proofs your cook and makes you look like a ****ing rock star.

Temperature stability is key to great, world-class meat. Stabilizing temperatures in a cheap, thin-wall offset smoker is nigh-on impossible. This is the voice of experience talking - I have bought and tried both. Not just blowing smoke - pun intended.

Brisket - there's a comment above that it is super hard to do a brisket. I disagree - I've found all meats equally easy to cook up, if you keep a couple things in mind:

There are two 'secrets' to getting good results from any smoke: 1) Temp control, temp control, temp control. This is really hard to do on cheap smokers, but see above re: egg-type smokers. For short (3-6 hour) cooks, you can make do on a cheap smoker for years. Doing brisket on a cheap cooker would indeed be tough - just for all the time you'd spend diddling with the fire and adding coals, and for all the money you'd spend on fuel. You could smoke for 3-6 hours, and transfer to an oven for the rest of the night, though. I've done this countless times with stellar results on my cheap Brinkman.

2) Know the meat. Each cut and animal is different, and you need to study up about fat content and connective tissue. I actually find brisket to be super-easy, because the excessive fat cap and fat marbling really idiot-proofs the cook and self-bastes the meat. This, even after trimming several POUNDS of fat from a whole brisket before starting the cook. On the other hand, one of my favorite smokes is deer ham, which is almost completely lacking in fat while having tons of gristly connective tissue and silver skin. Fatty cuts are more forgiving and come up to 'done' temp slowly and more smoothly. Cook sessions for lean cuts often go "raw raw raw raw raw raw OVERCOOKED" with no warning. For lean cuts, simply monitor the meat militantly and pull it off as soon as the temp hits the desired internal temp, period. Fatty cuts with lots of connective tissue, like brisket - the art is in giving the connective tissue time to heat up and melt, yet without overcooking and burning the meat. How to do that, you ask? Go back and read trick #1. Most everything you can imagine has already been covered at the Virtual Weber Bullet site. Anything they haven't covered, you can extrapolate once you've got some experience.

Rubs - for brisket I played around with concocting the perfect rub for months, then tossed it and went with 55/45 salt/pepper. Texas BBQ - and brisket is quintessential Texas BBQ - is all about simplicity and letting the meat do most of the talking. Take it easy on the smoke and rub, and just let the meat shine. Now for short ribs, I still show off quite a bit with the rub. I do 1/2 C salt, 1/2 C dark brown sugar, 1 tbsp each chili powder, fresh ground coffee, cumin, mustard, black pepper. I buy un-cut beef short ribs that can exceed 1-lb post-cook weight (!) and hang off the sides of the plate.