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Speaker 1
Your resume is good in numbers given to give more people.

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Speaker 1
You're listening to the Barbecue Nerds podcast, where smoked meat science and flavor is our favorite experiment. Hey, barbecue lovers, I'm David, your resident pitmaster and science geek, along with my co-host Frank. We're diving deep into the world of barbecue where tradition meets innovation. Now let's get to today's episode.

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Speaker 1
I've recently seen this and this is really for the for the backyard,

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Speaker 1
barbecue fanatic or even those that are used to round bar on whatever type of cooker they're using currently it uses.

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Speaker 1
And you mentioned at the beginning steam, there's a pad that's on the end of your, your brush head.

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Speaker 1
You dip it in water and as long as your grates are, are raging hot, you just go over it. Yeah. And it seems whatever gunk that's on the that round more right off. It seems to work fairly well.

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Speaker 1
I have seen because of heat, discoloration of the bars.

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Speaker 1
It won't get that off. You almost get like a bluing, a purplish color,

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Speaker 1
a haze that, like, shows up on it. So it's like a weird rainbow color that tends to stick in the bluish, purplish range, but it does a magnificent job of of knocking everything off and keeping them clean. Yeah. And then I've heard other people.

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Speaker 1
I guess this is really when we're dealing with, with stainless that you spray the inside of the, the cover to your barbecue and then close it, and it helps to clean the stainless lid inside of your barbecue. Yeah. When you spoke earlier in the conversation about steaming, was that one of the, the the modalities that you were speaking of?

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Speaker 2
Yes.

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Speaker 2
You got to get your pit over 300 degrees for it to work because it's got to it's got to be pretty fast. If your cooker is like two 5240, something like that, it's not going to vaporize fast enough. But if you can run your pit over 300 degrees for an extended period of time,

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Speaker 2
getting up to the point where you're ready to mist it in, and then the finer you can mist the like, atomized the water going in,

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Speaker 2
like a sprayer on a water hose, it's got like multiple streams is too much.

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Speaker 2
It needs to be like mist it in there, almost like a Windex kind of bottle. We used to bottle, you know. But if you could get in there with one of those, the problem is you got to be able to pull that trigger really fast. So a bug sprayer, a good clean bug sprayer bottle might be better.

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Speaker 2
But you want to hurry up and get your spot, whatever you're going to do and, and shut the lid as fast as you can, and then that steam is just working in there.

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Speaker 2
No different than any kind of a steam cleaner or anything else. And the steam is so hot. That's what the deal is, is that water is 212 degrees, but whenever it finally vaporizes, it can superheat, and that's when it expands and gets super hot. It'll get as hot as you want it to get, and that steam can release all of that grease and stuff off the wall.

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Speaker 2
It'll get as hot as the Airstream is in your pit. If you're running 300 degrees, your air is probably close to 706 hundred degrees coming in there, and it at least that hot as it flashes you know, and,

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Speaker 2
that'll help release all that. What, that grease and stuff off the wall, you know, which is really, really good.

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Speaker 1
You brought to mind,

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Speaker 1
I, I guess something that I have here again, we use this,

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Speaker 1
when I was doing the, the barbecue competitions rather than the sprayer where you keep pulling it with the trigger. The hog sprayers. Things are available at places like Tractor Supply, where you pull it at the top with whatever liquid you have, right.

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Speaker 1
And you pump it all the air in both sprayer. You just hold it. That's it. I, I yeah,

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Speaker 1
just and just spray. Go for it. That way you're not working out that trigger finger.

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Speaker 2
Yeah yeah yeah yeah. That's what I was calling a bug sprayer but yeah okay. Yeah, yeah. Around here. Yeah. For bugs.

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Speaker 2
Oh yeah, so there you go. Yeah, that's what I do, is is the steaming thing. And I think I even show that in that video.

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Speaker 2
When you steam like that, it just everything just runs right down. It's pretty cool to watch it happen.

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Speaker 2
There was another question in here a minute ago about birds.

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Speaker 2
I wanted to bring up smokestacks, too.

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Speaker 2
Hojo asked, anyone ever have any birds or four legged friends take up residence and

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Speaker 2
in the smokestack? I've never had that happen personally, but I keep my smokestack damper closed. So have you ever seen anything like that?

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Speaker 1
Yep. With the smoked quail in the past? Sure. Oh. Have you. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

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Speaker 1
So? So with pets, when you start to to get up there and a collection of pets, what happens is there's times that you don't use that pet as often as you. You know, you went in first when you bought it. You intended to use it because we're always getting a new toy in.

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Speaker 1
Some of the older toys tend to to sit out there. They get moved around,

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Speaker 1
they, they, we put them out there in the, in the field, you know what I mean?

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Speaker 1
And,

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Speaker 1
animals will will find their way in. But when you're dealing with,

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Speaker 1
wood birds that build a nest, one of the best ways to get them out there is you're just so far.

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Speaker 2
Right.

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Speaker 1
That's it.

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Speaker 1
All right. And they find a new home.

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Speaker 2
Yeah,

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Speaker 2
yeah. So the reason I wanted to bring that up, though, what I have had happen, we were talking about,

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Speaker 2
flue fires and flues earlier in the conversation,

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Speaker 2
from a firefighter's perspective. And whenever you burn wood, that is either a been soaked or B is too green, it's not seasoned properly. You're going to get a lot of of water vapor and stuff in the air.

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Speaker 2
Plus you're going to have already all the particulate that's in the airstream. This things you smell is particulate. That's what it is. That's why you can smell them. So there's there's all kinds of other things in the Airstream while it's leaving the, the, the, the firebox going into your pit. And if your wood is green, it's going to be likely that you're going to be suffering to get your pit temp up.

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Speaker 2
So when your air mass is not hot enough, that water, that water vapor that is vaporized in the airstream as the airstream cools down in your smokestack, you may not see moisture inside the cook chamber, but in the smokestack, it'll cool off a lot faster as it goes up, and so you'll have condensation forming inside the smokestack. And if you ever saw that black,

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Speaker 2
like that, that black water or whatever it is, it's just really nasty film that you see in there.

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Speaker 2
That's what's happening. You're you're getting a soot buildup inside your smokestack. And I've literally seen guys bring me pits that weren't working, used to run like crazy for a couple, 3 or 4 years, you know, whatever. Course they never cleaned them. I'm thinking of one particular pit. They never cleaned them, and probably the smokestack was too small to begin with.

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Speaker 2
But when it got back to me, instead of it being a four inch smokestack, believe it or not, it was like an inch and a half.

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Speaker 1
Wow.

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Speaker 2
Because it just had that much buildup and it was the full length of that stack. It like, I don't know how it does it, but somehow in that Airstream, there's enough garbage in that Airstream that's condensing, you know, like,

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Speaker 2
the EPA has people in California do this thing called method nine testing, which is opacity. And so we can literally look at the color of the smoke, and we can tell you whether or not your Airstream is clean enough, right.

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Speaker 2
And so like all the charcoal plants have to do it, a bunch of places like that. And when you drive by and you see this big smokestack, that's just like blowing a bunch of white smoke out of it, that's not actually smoke, that's steam. And they're using a thing called a scrubber. This is what they're using. And they use that water to trap all of the stuff from going out the smokestack.

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Speaker 2
And it's scrubs it and it condenses and it goes down into a containment of some kind where they can dispose of it safely. And that's what happens,

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Speaker 2
with your smoker, a lot of times is you're just it's the same thing, especially if you have a water pan in your smoker, if you have a water pan in your smoker or something like that, you're making it worse.

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Speaker 1
That's,

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Speaker 2
You're the steam gets in your air and it's got to condense somewhere. It's like as the airstream cools down, we're going to start losing all that moisture. It's got to go somewhere. Anything that's built up will collect along the sides of the whatever is condensing the water.

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Speaker 1
You know, you just went down an interesting pathway when it came to reading smoke. There's courses that firefighters take and being able to identify when we pull up to a structure fire, a residential fire, to be able to know just based upon the smoke what, what conditions we're about to walk into. And you're right, if we see white smoke, that means that that fire is on its way out means that there's water that's hitting the fire.

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Speaker 1
But if we see that chalky brown smoke, this fire is about to roll. It's about to. That room can very easily if we're coming in. Well, we see it through the windows.

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Speaker 1
It's about to flash over, especially when you see the twinkling. And I know I'm getting a little bit off from where we are. We're cleaning pits, however, is very relevant to knowing that if you you're looking at your smokestack and you see black smoke coming out, that's an easy way to be able to identify you've got a grease fire without ever opening up your, your, your smoke leads to your smoke chamber.

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Speaker 1
Yeah. However, if you're seeing white smoke coming out somewhere along the line and I it's I'm glad you brought that up. The water pan. There's a good chance that water got on to the charcoal or onto your somehow into your cook chamber. Or if you're using I'm going to use for this example, a super 55 drum. You had a water pan in there and the water pan somehow fell down or leaked right onto your charcoal.

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Speaker 1
And what you're seeing coming out is steam. That fire is going out

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Speaker 1
now.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, it is smoldering. That's what we're seeing here with white. White smoke is smoldering.

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Speaker 1
That's correct.

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Speaker 2
And the other thing is, as you can tell, if your wood, if you're using a stick burner, you can tell if your wood is wet because at the end grain, like you get the the length of the log out, the end of it where all the you can see all the ring stuff out, the end of the wood, it'll actually be boiling the sap and the sap will be foamy coming out the end of that log.

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Speaker 2
When you see that your wood is too wet, I should not have that happening. So what I do is I preheat my wood is what I do to prevent that. And if you preheat your wood, you'll give it a chance to just naturally evaporate a lot of that. It'll light a lot faster and it'll burn a lot cleaner.

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Speaker 2
But especially if you're like me and you cut your own wood and you run out because you're too lazy to go cut wood. And so you heard them cut a whole bunch of wood, and then you got to cook, and then you wind up having to dry your wood in the oven or something. I don't do that.

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Speaker 2
But you know what I'm saying, right? Like we have to do a cook the day before just to dry our wood so that we have dry wood the next day to cook with.

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Speaker 2
I've done that.

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Speaker 2
But now I've got a,

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Speaker 2
I've got a,

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Speaker 2
a vent co warmer in the garage that my buddy Aaron hooked me up with.

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Speaker 2
And I set that thing for 135, 140. And I just put all my wood in that thing and just let it rock and,

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Speaker 2
let it have a good couple. Three hours of cooking in there. You'll see moisture on the the window

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Speaker 2
because it's got a glass, plexiglass window in it. It's great way. I got that tip from Jeremy Yoder.

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Speaker 2
He did a video, by the way, on Mad Scientist barbecue,

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Speaker 2
where he took wood and he put it in his warmer, his Vive or warmer or whatever. And he left for two weeks and came back and they tried to cook with it. And,

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Speaker 2
it was the video was very educational. It was pretty cool. And then I was like, I've been doing it wrong my whole life.

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Speaker 2
We got a pellet cooker. We got,

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Speaker 2
another thing. Let's get our heat or wood hot. All

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Speaker 2
right. So we can cook on the stick burner easier.

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Speaker 1
It makes sense.

00:12:10:17 - 00:12:34:23
Speaker 1
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Barbecue Nerds podcast, where smoked meats, science, and flavor always comes first. This episode is brought to you by Smoke Slinger, the craftsman behind some of the best barbecue pits and offset smokers in the game. Whether you're a backyard warrior or a pro, Pitmaster smoke slinger builds custom pits designed to help you cook your best barbecue ever.

00:12:35:01 - 00:12:54:19
Speaker 1
Visit Smoke slinger.com to see their lineup and bring competition quality smoke to your own backyard. A big shout out to smoke slinger fueling our passion and keeping the smoke rolling strong. And as always, keep those pits hot, the smoke rolling and stay nerdy about barbecue.