Getting the right amount of smokey flavor when BBQing on a bullet smoker

Putting the wood chunks under the charcoal before lighting it works really, really well.

Here's the deal. I love slow and low cooking. After spending years on slow cooker and sous vide recipes smoking food was clearly going to happen. I bought a really cheap bullet smoker earlier this summer and wrote a few pieces about using it while camping. The food was amazing, however, the cheap bullet smoker pretty much fell apart after 4 uses.

I bought the Weber. The Weber Smokey Mountain really is wonderful and I wish I'd not bothered with the cheap smoker. Construction and materials quality are 1000x better.

My brother is a chef and runs several restaurants. When he relaxes with cooking he makes bbq on an offset smoker. While he was teaching me about smoking vegetables, fruit and meat that offset smoker would eat tons of wood. I was under the impression you needed to keep adding wood to get stuff to have that smokey flavor.

The bullet smoker is a very different animal. You do not need that much wood. You do not need to adjust or dick with the fire very often, and if you put in enough coals at the start you can pretty much get through 12-16 hours of smoking a brisket without adding fuel.

If you keep adding chunks of wood like it is my brother's offset smoker you end up with over smoked food.

I still ate it, but luckily didn't have to share with anyone.

Reading online there is a lot of advice. Read the rest