Avid BBQ’er here . Cooked with everything except pellets until a couple years ago . The pellet smokers are basically an oven fed by pellets. Very little smoke flavor and very boring . I honestly wish I had never bought my last one and stuck to my original smoker the Weber Smokey mountain . Same with my newer Weber genesis it’s a flaring , too hot all the time mess and the 50 dollar 90s genesis it replaced with flavoriser bars was 10 times the grill . All a man needs is a Weber kettle and a Smokey mountain and he can out cook 95 percent of the bbq joints . I have smoked a ridiculous amount of Q that’s my honest opinion.
From a post I made in one of the RecTec groups where people new to pellet smokers think they need more smoke with smoke tubes and so on…
I've seen a lot of posts where people are complaining about not enough smoke and they're using smoke tubes - or even telling new Recteq owners that they need smoke tubes.
Why are people saying this?
The meat will only take smoke up to a certain temp point (140 or so) to develop the smoke ring.
Prior to buying my BFG years ago I thought that what I had been doing for years on my stick burner was right and I was making good BBQ. I mean...everyone said they loved it. 😂
When I was researching a pellet smoker I read about people saying that "you need a smoke tube because the pellet smokers - no matter what brand you get - don't produce as much smoke as a wood smoker"
They're absolutely right. They don't. And that's good.
If you're a guy (like me) that had a stick burner and think your new pellet smoker isn't producing enough smoke here's a simple way to tell if it is or isn't producing good smoke...
Look at the meat.
Are you developing that nice smoke ring during your cooks? If so, you're (your pellet smoker is) doing it right. Your smoke is good.
What's happening is likely what initially happened when I moved to a pellet smoker. The taste/flavor was different. There wasn't as much of a smoke taste. Initially that was a bad thing to me because the smoke flavor wasn't as strong.
The whole family discussed this. How "my ribs" tasted vs the ribs from the pellet smoker. The consensus was that while the ribs off the BFG were good, they didn't have AS MUCH smoke flavor as my ribs.
Then common sense kicked in, I looked at the smoke ring, realized I had a great smoke ring, and meat wasn't black from smoke, but I still had great smoke flavor, and that's when it hit me that I HAD BEEN OVERSMOKING MY MEAT for years.
Why? I mostly had inconsistent cooks on the stick burner where the smoke changed depending on how well the fire was tended while I was mowing or working around the house. Instead of the thick, heavy smoke that was somewhat common with the stick burner the pellet smoke provided a nice, clean, even, consistent smoke.
Whoops!
If any of you think you need a smoke tube or someone tells you that you need one, just take a look at your meat. Have a nice smoke ring?
If so, keep doing what you're doing. You have plenty of smoke.
I have a BFG. I've seen people in here say you need smoke tubes with pellet smokers. Especially a BFG. It's simply not true.
Everything below was cooked on a BFG.
