open pit vs closed pit barbecue - taste difference?

[Stephen Tashiro]

What's the difference in taste between food cooked by open pit barbecuing versus food cooked in closed pits?

There's lots of information on the internet about open pit barbecuing. I find less on closed pit barbecuing - if the term "closed pit" is even used. I think of closed pit barbecuing as wrapping foot in something and burying it in a pit of hot coals. Is that the way it's done? Or is the wrapped food actually suspended a little way above the coals?

A favorite childhood memory is getting a meal from "the fireman's barbecue", which was the annual fund raising barbecue held by the volunteer fire department. I didn't see how it was cooked. The chicken came wrapped in foil, but it might have been cooked in the open pit way and then wrapped later.

There are barbecue "grills" that have tops that are closed over the food. Is the food generally wrapped when cooked in this way?

[Jim Koepke]

At my former residence the neighbors had a closed pit. It was actually a piece of concrete water pipe about 20" in diameter and 4' long.

They would often trim off leaves from an agave cactus and line a wire basket with them. They would put a pig inside and lower it into the coals that had been burning since the night before. Then they would cover the top, party during the day and have the most amazing succulent pork at dinner time.

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jtk

[roger wiegand]

The classic New England clambake involves a similar procedure-- dig a hole in the sand at the beach, add rocks and build a fire, once it has burned down layer seaweed, clams, and lobsters and let it cook. I think people have been cooking that way for 200,000 years.

The worst fail I know of was a luau attempt, where the pig after a day of cooking was still raw (a microbiological nightmare, I'm sure). The enterprising scientists organizing the event took the pig back to the lab and put it onto the autoclave to hurry the cooking along (and sterilize it, presumably). It worked great, except that various pig parts blocked the drain inside the autoclave and when they opened the door they were greeted with a "water"fall as three inches (many, many gallons) of hot pig fat cascaded out, lending an aroma to that floor of the building that lasted for months. It apparently tasted OK.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Here in the south, we have "Pig Cookers." Shop made ones are usually a 275 gallon oil barrel. With barrel laying flat ways, it is filleted about 9" down from top. Add a couple of racks, and some doors in the ends to feed coals thru, plus mount top to lower with a set of hinges. You will need some kind of counter weight to lift the top. The two racks are for cooking pig skin side up for four hours on one rack, then making a sandwich of the two racks with pig in the middle, flip whole shebang over. Mine has the ability to use either gas, charcoal, or wood coals. We usually start pig on gas for the first couple hours. All you are doing is warming the pig up. Then switch to charcoal, or wood coals. I own two that i built myself. First has a pull out drawer for gas burner, and tent over burner. Tent serves to keep grease from dropping onto burner. With burner and tent removed, you can add coals, or charcoal. Second one only has two doors for coals, or gas burner. All of the above is mounted on some kind of trailer. I've been to my brother's three times over the years to cook a pig. He lives in Louisville KY. Hardest thing was finding a pig that hadn't been skinned. As a kid, pigs were cooked over a pit down at tobacco barn, thus the name "Pit Cooked BBQ". Tobacco was cured using wood, so coals were readily available. Pit was dug, and an old bed frame of wire was placed over pit. Pig was laid on bed frame, with a sheet of tin over it, usually supported a couple inches above pig. Coals were shoveled into pit from either end. Because of lack of refrigeration, pig was killed and dressed late in the afternoon, then cooked over night. A lot of adult beverages (many not tax paid) were consumed in the cooking of the pig

[Stephen Tashiro]

To repeat the original question: Does food barbecued in a closed pit taste much different than food barbecued on an open pit?

[Stan Calow]

No. Not because of the "pit". Its all about time, temperature and the wood smoke. The goal is to have a pink smoke ring on the meat when you slice it in criss section. Open gives you less control of the temperature. Most serious BBQrs use a smoker not a grill anyway.

[Bruce King]

I agree with the previous post. The easiest and most widely used is “smoking butts”. A pork shoulder or two has dry rub on it or sometimes just plain. It’s cooked in a charcoal smoker or a big kettle grill at 200 to 250 degrees for 5 to 8 hours. Digital meat thermometer is used to know when it’s done. Google the plateau that explains how the internal temperature will stop rising for awhile and then continue. Wood chips soaked in water are added throughout as much as you like the smoked taste. Sauces go on when served. Tomato based, Hot sauce, vinegar based, mustard based or white Alabama sauce. A good restaurant will have all these unless it’s a small place just for locals then you get what the majority like. Sauce is called dip in the small barbecue town of Lexington NC. The best I’ve had is Swig and Swine in Mt Pleasant SC and West Ashley/Charleston SC and they have all the sauces.
Also, many places chop their meat real fine. This drys it out but it’s still ok with sauce on it. The places I like give you big chunks of juicy que.

[Scott Winners]

Such a huge subject. BBQ as a subject has many discussion forums bigger than this one about woodworking.

In general open and closed type cookers can both produce brilliant food. If you prefer the taste of food from one or the other it doesn't mean the rest of us have defective taste buds, just that you have eaten enough Q to have a preference.

As an Alaskan all of my slow cookers are closed, lidded, so I can run them in cold weather. But I did buy a spit just a couple weeks ago so I can do whole lambs from Costco next season on sticks. BRB.

[Scott Winners]

Moved to my full sized keyboard...typing on my phone wasn't doing it for me. FWIW I am the crew chief of my church's BBQ team. We served (three team members) 550 plates last year in two cooks. The plague is cutting down on what how many people we can reach this year, but we will likely hit 300 plates in two cooks this year, we are doing burgers and hotdogs for 150 next weekend.

It is fairly common to wrap freshly cooked BBQ in tin foil and then stick it in an insulated box - a cambro. A regular cooler makes a perfectly serviceable cambro, but you want to put a bath towel down in the bottom so the hot food doesn't melt through the cooler wall. If I was doing a bunch of whole chicken for a big crowd I would wrap them individually in tinfoil coming out of the cookers, stick the foil wrapped birds in some kind of cambro and be ready to serve.

I have heard of open pits, but I have not personally heard the term "closed pit" before. Besides the Hawaiian pit for luau pig - the cooker is an "imu" , there is also a brick lined cooker from Mexico called a thing I didn't pull up quickly with a couple internet searches.

Texans generally use lidded cookers, I spent a week shuttling around the countryside between San Antonio and Austin a couple years ago, the cooler I checked to fly home came in at 44# when I arrived at the airport. In operation the cooker is closed, but they can open a lid or door to flip the meat or fiddle with the fire.

Francis Mallmann does a fair bit of cooking with embers and hot ash with buried foods, but generally vegetables. See "Seven Fires Francis Mallmann" I am working my way through that cookbook now.

In Las Cruces you are in the downtown area of beef on mesquite. If you like the food at a couple places in town more than others, ask your server how to make it at home. Good cooks, really good cooks, will be delighted to talk about their process. It would not be at all unusual for a pitmaster to come out to the dining room to talk to a customer, at any decent BBQ joint in the country. If they are slammed with customers the server may come back and say "We get ___ cut of beef from Joe's farm and mesquite wood from Tom's ranch, and the pitmaster could probably talk to you in person about 2PM on Tuesday after the lunch service." Expect a kitchen tour when you go back on a Tuesday.

I do want to encourage you, but I don't want to bury you with a wall of text, that could be discouraging.

If you are in an apartment complex that will only let you have a small electic grill on your balcony, you can make excellent barbecue at home with a little practice. If you are limited to gas/propane look for the highest BTU rating you can afford. All the gas cookers can do "low" just fine, what you would be paying for is top end. If you are allowed to burn charcoal, the only entry level grill on the market worth looking at is the medium sized Weber, about 22" in diameter. The wee one with the 18" grate is not bad for picnics, and the super duper sized with the 26" grate is not needed.

I can do a 15# turkey on the mid sized (22") Weber no problem. With all four kids home I can churn out burgers or pizzas on a single 22 incher no problem. When the inlaws and grandkids start showing up I will have to start firing my other 22" Weber.

If you choose this rabbit hole, start with a 22 inch Weber and then hit your local used book store for any of the annual Weber cookbooks. This year's Weber cookbook is going to set you back about $30. The 2012 edition (or 2008 or 2016) should be about three bucks at the literacy council bookstore and is a fine place to start.

FWIW I have 6 BBQ cookers at my house right now. If I lose the house tomorrow and can only take one cooker with me, it will be a 22" Weber.

What is the one thing you really want to cook? What are you spending too much on at restuarants? And what separates the grilled or smoked food you love from the same menu item at a different place that doesn't live up to your expectations?

I see I have written a wall of text in about seven seconds.

What do you want to cook? What do you order every time you visit a new restaraunt?

[Scott Winners]

To repeat the original question: Does food barbecued in a closed pit taste much different than food barbecued on an open pit?

Just reviewing the thread after my two posts above. Yes, it does make a difference. Both can be excellent, and both can suck. There are many many more variable to consider and control.

If I could only control one variable, it would be temperature. It is much easier to control temperature (in my extreme climate) with a closed cooker. The other option is to focus on meats that can be grilled (cooked hot and fast) like shellfish, fish, and beef/pork cuts near the spinal cord. Beef/pork cuts away from the spinal cord like brisket are more amenable to cooking low and slow; and require better temperature control for extended cooking periods.

The next variable - for my taste buds- is the flavoring wood. Slivers and splinters soaked in water and tossed on burning charcoal (or into a gas grill) leave me cold generally, but with practice and experience it is possible to get good food out of a low powered electric smoker. I have never done it, but one of my co workers does consistently. Next up is fist sized hunks of flavoring wood smoldering in the charcoal, a major step up from sawdust that I used to really like. The epitome, to me, is glowing red coals of the flavoring wood. I built a smoker specifically for salmon, and then brought in a literal truckload of alder wood. Running alder sticks only in the firebox, no charcoal, keeping about 225 degrees in the food chamber with a gang of red hot alder coals with some flaming alder sticks in the firebox was the best salmon I ever made.

My typical practice now is to light about 1/3 of a chimney of charcoal with fist sized pieces of pecan-hickory-apple-whatever in it, let the wood burn down to coals, fill the chimey on up, get that lit, then cook on it. To me the difference between smoldering chunks and glowing chunks is (sorry you are in NM) sort of like the difference between mittens and gloves. I get a more subtle enjoyable flavor with glowing gloves than I get from smoldering (blunt, agressive) mittens.

You can, without breaking the bank, get good consistent food out of either.

[Tim Tucker]

A great thread!...of course I am jaded, because I too am a BBQ-holic. So much so that I several years ago I started a site to collect ideas and recipes for people to share. It is friendly, free, and no flame wars. Everyone is welcome to join. It is completely secure, no spam, no user info for sale EVER. It is not for profit, just for anyone the loves to cook outdoors and wants to get or share tips, tricks, ideas and recipes. It is LetsTalkBBQ.com Hope to see you there as well.

[Kev Williams]

My only open pit experience was waaaayy back when I was a boy scout. The 'masters dug a hole, and IIRC they filled the bottom with briquettes. Meanwhile they had a bigazz bonfire going. They waited till the fire burned down, thru in a pig, then shoveled the firepit contents on top of the pig. I think they covered the hole with some corrugated steel...

My mom raised us on pork everything, but this pig didn't taste anything like any pig mom cooked. And not in a good way, it just plain tasted funny. I don't know why, but for all I know they were burning railroad ties in that fire. All I know is, I couldn't eat it, and left (I was a short bicycle-ride from home) before I got any critique from the rest of the crowd. 53 years later I'm still open-pit free.

Now, hobo dinners- meat & veggies wrapped in tin foil and thrown in the campfire embers, THAT's good eatin'... :)

[Steve Demuth]

What's the difference in taste between food cooked by open pit barbecuing versus food cooked in closed pits? ...

There are barbecue "grills" that have tops that are closed over the food. Is the food generally wrapped when cooked in this way?

The only "closed pit" barbeque I know of is Polynesian style - where you cook the pig, wrapped in leaves or other wet plant material, on a bed of coals and hot rocks with earth heaped over to seal the heat and much of the moisture in. You don't get a lot of smoke into the pork that way, compared to open cooking directly over wood and coals. Both are very good, but the Polynesian method is more a "steamed in it's own juices" than dry cooked approach.

We cook a pig once a year on July 4th for a community picnic. We get a bit of both methods. We kill our pig, scald and scrape it so the entire skin (rind) of the pig remains intact. After evisceration, we stuff the body cavity with veggies (sweet potatoes, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, mushrooms and lots of dried figs) and sew the skin up tight. We then roast the whole pig about 7-8 hours suspended on a grill 12" above coals in a covered concrete "pit." It runs 450-500F in the pit. The rind immediately bakes very hard and nearly impermeable, so most of the pig cooks in it own juices much like a Polynesian roast, but the thin layers of the flanks and loins dry out and get pretty well smoked. The veggies are basically cooked in a continuous drizzle of hot, smokey pig fat. The figs and mushrooms are absolutely the best decadent foodstuff I eat year over year.

Didn't get to do it this year, for obvious reasons. First one we've missed in close to 40 years.

[Bruce King]

Oh yeah, did some hobo dinners back in my tent camping days. I like to grill but for two people we just get our pork fresh from our favorite restaurant. We grill a lot of fish. Same problem with chicken, we have a Peruvian chicken place nearby that is cooked in brick charcoal ovens. I would grill more if I wasn’t making so much sawdust. My wife does the majority of our grilling now. I have the Weber 22 inch charcoal and Weber dual burner gas.

[Stephen Tashiro]

What is the one thing you really want to cook?

My goal is only to add details to a nostalgic memory. Running a grill or smoker in the city has its problems. You hear from all dogs in the neighborhood and your equipment attracts various other critters.

However, I'm intellectually curious about grilling and barbecue and have tried those methods on occasion. I've never tried cooking in a pit in the ground.



What do you order every time you visit a new restaraunt?

I order a bacon and eggs breakfast if they are still serving breakfast. Otherwise, in my current location, the safe choice is beef fahitas. Steak and seafood are nice, but (locally) they are risky choices.


A dish I would go to some trouble to recreate or purchase is a chopped pork barbecue sandwich as recalled from one served by a little food stand in Charlottesville VA. (chopped - not "pulled")

[Stan Calow]

Stephen, around here, home BBQ'rs will seldom cook a pork butt or roast on a grill or smoker, because they're too big to handle easily. Its more common to cook them in a slow cooker, where they cook evenly and with plenty of liquid, and chop or shred them after that. You don't miss the smoke flavor because there's so much other flavoring going on.
But if you ever come here to Kansas City, where there are approximately one zillion BBQ restaurants, look for burnt ends on the menu. These are beef or pork chopped from the ends of brisket or whatever, so they have a lot of crispy and tender to them when done right. Pulled pork not that common on restaurant menus.

Check out the Kansas City Barbecue Society who might have some technical info and I think offers some classes: https://www.kcbs.us

[Stephen Tashiro]

Stephen, around here, home BBQ'rs will seldom cook a pork butt or roast on a grill or smoker, because they're too big to handle easily. Its more common to cook them in a slow cooker, where they cook evenly and with plenty of liquid, and chop or shred them after that.


A surprising (to me) fact is that you can cook things in a slow-cooker without adding liquid. I learned this from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKEcHiPdTcY&list=LL3H9mZV998TRJkXS425RrZg&index=376 A similar technique works for chicken.

[Scott Winners]

My goal is only to add details to a nostalgic memory. Running a grill or smoker in the city has its problems. You hear from all dogs in the neighborhood and your equipment attracts various other critters.


A dish I would go to some trouble to recreate or purchase is a chopped pork barbecue sandwich as recalled from one served by a little food stand in Charlottesville VA. (chopped - not "pulled")

Chopped versus pulled is a choice to make after the shoulder is cooked and has had a rest in the cambro.

Doing a full pork shoulder, or a 15# turkey, or a good sized ham is the upper limit for a 22" Weber but it can be done. The key for all three is some kind of metal wall to keep the hot coals out from under the dripping meat. And I have to add charcoal about every 45 minutes.

Just about any gas grille should be able to handle a full shoulder, 8-10 pounds usually, I prefer them with the bone in.

A low powered electric smoker could struggle here - I defer immediately to those who have done it, I have not. One option, if needed, would be to slice a shoulder (across the grain) into steak shaped cuts since you want to chop it anyway. Might be easier to start with a boneless shoulder for that.

I personally run whole bone in pork shoudlers at 225 degrees F for 8-10 hours. I like jiggling the end of the bone sticking out to judge tenderness, but do use a meat thermometer to judge internal temperature as well. You might cut some time off that cook by wrapping the shoulder in foil after it has been bare on the grate in the smoke for a few hours. I generally don't, but I am generally running one shoulder and one brisket on each of the racks in my smoker. I cut a little time off the brisket cook by wrapping the brisket when it gets to "the stall", leave the shoulder bare and generally both cuts will be done at about the same time.

Pork shoulder is a very forgiving cook, it can take a lot of temperature variation over the time of the cook, and is the first cut of meat I have new team members cook when they are ready to take on long cooks. Brisket is a lot fussier to cook, at least partly because beef brisket has less marbling than pork shoulder, but I don't really know why for sure.

Yet another option would be to smoke a full shoulder in a charcoal cooker at 225 until the charcoal runs out, wrap the shoulder in foil and then finish it in the oven in the kitchen.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Annually for the last 26 years, we have cooked either Boston butts, or pork shoulders for Campers on Mission BBQ at State Fair. We've done then both on charcoal. and gas only. Cook around 185- 200# of meat. Cook it at no more than 275 degrees for about eight hours. When it's done, we shake it off the bone into our chopping box. Box is made from oak, about 16" wide, X 16" tall, and 30" long. Bottom boards have cracks about 1/8" between them to allow for grease to run out. Actual chopping is done with scraper hoes, also know as ice scrapers. Any sauces is added to meat while in box. Then BBQ is stored in ice chest till served. Typical BBQ includes 185# of meat, 100# of potatoes, 80# of slaw, 20# of hush puppy mix, 30 gallons of iced tea, and a huge tray of banana pudding, along with other desserts. All of which is FREE to fair workers as a part of the ministry. Already missing not doing it this year due to Covid 19