00;00;00;14 - 00;00;20;09
Speaker 1
If chasing thermometer reading stresses you out. This episode's for you. Hey! Barbecue nerds! Hey, welcome to the podcast. And this podcast is for folks who don't just cook barbecue. They nerd out on it.

00;00;20;12 - 00;00;50;16
Speaker 1
Here we break down the fire and the science and the secrets behind great barbecue. Hey. And now here's your host and the barbecue pit engineer, Frank Cox. Welcome back, barbecue nerds. I'm Frank Cox, and today we're going to be talking about temperature myths. Something else that I would like to mention real quick is that this episode builds on the last two.

00;00;50;18 - 00;01;14;22
Speaker 1
So if you haven't already, listen to those. Make sure you go back and listen to the one that we did first, which is fire behavior talks all about how heat moves through your pit. And then the next one we did, which was last week, draw an airflow. Basically, we explained volume and velocity. So this episode kind of builds on that because what we're chasing is great barbecue.

00;01;14;25 - 00;01;40;25
Speaker 1
You know, the journey to cooking great barbecue does come with some frustration along the way. And, you know, I can remember back to my own experience, whenever I started chasing that perfect barbecue bite, you know, that I cooked myself without anybody showing me what to do. I can remember several things that I ran into, and I guarantee you probably have already run into these things yourself.

00;01;40;28 - 00;02;08;01
Speaker 1
One of those things is, like with our thermometers right now, a key instrument that we use to judge whether or not our cook is on pace with what we would consider great barbecue or not, or a great cook is the thermometer. And these things mean, I got to tell you, they they cause more frustration than they should. In my opinion, it's likely that you've seen or experienced a few of these things.

00;02;08;04 - 00;02;36;09
Speaker 1
For instance, panic whenever the pit drifts off of a target number. Another one would be feeling like anything above or below. 225 is wrong. Man, you get gaslit in some of these, Facebook groups about your temperature you're cooking at. Here's another one making big adjustments to chase small swings, big adjustments on dampers, rethinking your fire, even rethinking your recipes on what you're cooking.

00;02;36;11 - 00;03;06;14
Speaker 1
We'll see. Watching apps more than the pit. These things are a blessing and a curse. We can get to the point where we trust the app more than our senses as a pitmaster. That's a big thing. We're going to talk about today. And then, you know, also conflicting thermometer readings, which I've got a story to tell. Hopefully I'll remember to tell it, but suffice it to say, conflicting thermometer readings can cause a ton of confusion during a cook and leave you chasing your tail.

00;03;06;14 - 00;03;34;16
Speaker 1
Basically. I remember with the Smoker Builder Barbecue Forum, which you know, we had that going for a number of years and, you can't go there no more. It's at the website. It's been taken down for security purposes. But back in the day, man with smoker design. We chased and chased and chased even temperatures and the only way you can really measure even temperatures is with a thermometer anyway, is to have multiple of them.

00;03;34;19 - 00;03;56;25
Speaker 1
And by chasing the perfect pit with the perfect even airflow, we spend a lot more time looking at the thermometers and second guessing and making emotional, reactionary decisions on how to run the pit instead of actually looking at our barbecue. And that can actually cost you a brisket or whatever you're cooking. They could cost you the entire cook.

00;03;56;27 - 00;04;26;28
Speaker 1
And so my goal on this episode today is to demystify how temperature should be treated as far as a dial reading on a thermometer or a digital readout. So what are thermometers good for and what are thermometers not good for? I think for the purpose of having a more enjoyable cook and a more reliable in product, we need to kind of reframe the what we how we picture temperature in our pit.

00;04;27;00 - 00;04;55;17
Speaker 1
First thing to remember is that temperature readings on a thermometer is for context. It's not actually like a command line that we have to stay within on whatever the recipe is that we're doing. It tells us what our chamber temperature is. But as we all know, no brisket is created equal. They're all different, and they're all going to cook different, especially whenever you're in working with bigger muscle meats.

00;04;55;19 - 00;05;21;01
Speaker 1
So what it does not tell us is bark condition, render progress and tenderness. Those are the three main things that we need to pay attention to in order to get that great, perfectly rendered, awesome bark bite, a barbecue that we all seek. So we have to also keep in mind that air temperature does not equal the amount of heat that's hitting whatever we're cooking.

00;05;21;03 - 00;05;45;00
Speaker 1
It could be different in one spot on the grate than the other, because not just your airflow, but also the amount of radiant heat that's contained in that airflow like that. Like I say, when that fire comes out of that throat on that firebox, it's super excited, super high energy. And also the air does not move consistently inside of the smoker.

00;05;45;00 - 00;06;17;06
Speaker 1
It bounces around on things. Therefore, certain spots in the pit are a little bit warmer than others. And so you might have uneven cooking as far as appearance goes, you might have better bark formation on the back left and poor formation in the middle front. So the main problem with dial thermometers and digital thermometers is placement. Well, we're going to talk mostly about dial thermometers here for a minute just because like that's the most common thing we're looking at whenever we walk up to a pit, that's what's screwed in there.

00;06;17;06 - 00;06;43;25
Speaker 1
So the the placement of these thermometers has everything to do with how well that thermometer reads. So you have to keep in mind that the very end of the probe is the only thing that's actually reading anything. Something I've noticed in the past is that somebody will be complaining their pit isn't running right. And then I'll walk over there at a contest or whatever, and they've got this cold piece of meat like a brisket that said basically room temperature.

00;06;43;27 - 00;07;04;18
Speaker 1
They just put on the pit and it's about an inch away from the probe on the end of the thermometer. The way those work is that there's a by middle at the end of those two by metal strips. And at the very end of that thermometer is where those come in contact. One heats up, one cools, and that causes the spring to wind up or unwind in the in the dial, the head of the thermometer.

00;07;04;24 - 00;07;23;00
Speaker 1
And that's what makes the needle move. Well, if that brisket is sitting right next to the end of the probe, it's not going to get a good reading. Also, if you've got a thermometer that's placed like towards the firebox end and you're getting a much higher temperature reading, it doesn't always mean that the air temperature is super hot there.

00;07;23;02 - 00;07;55;12
Speaker 1
It could mean that you're just picking up a lot of that radiant heat out of that air, and it's super heating the end of that thermometer probe. This is something I've never heard anybody talk about. What we think we're doing is putting a thermometer inside of a smoker cook chamber to get an air temperature reading. But what we don't realize is that even though they don't read radiant heat, they can't tell you what the what the radiant heat content of the areas, but they are drastically affected by intense amounts of radiant heat, especially at the firebox end of a pit.

00;07;55;14 - 00;08;20;20
Speaker 1
So some issues with digital probes, they're also sensitive to placement. But the biggest one of all, and this is where my story comes in, is they can disagree with each other no matter what the brand. Even if you bought them both at the same time off the shelf, they're just in. They're notoriously unreliable. My story real quick on that is we took care of restaurant equipment for a long time in commercial refrigeration.

00;08;20;20 - 00;08;42;09
Speaker 1
Our company did, and the health department would come into the restaurant establishment and they would check all the temperatures and they would say, something's not working. It's 42 degrees or whatever, right? Just above 40 degrees. So of course, the restaurant manager would call us and we'd have to rush right in there and we'd have to check it. Well, our guys would go in with their thermometer.

00;08;42;09 - 00;09;08;00
Speaker 1
We have a completely different brand. It's a much more expensive thermometer. It's a better thermometer. And it would read possibly for say, it would read the correct temperature. But the health department's thermometer and the little cheap dial thermometer that's kept in the cup near the cook line did not read the right temperature. So we had to get to a point where we were like, okay, none of these things are agreeing with each other.

00;09;08;08 - 00;09;31;05
Speaker 1
So we actually had to have our guys use the customer's thermometer instead of our really good, fancy, expensive one so that we could just get past the health department. That that right there, that lesson. Why? It took a lot of time, even though it sounds so simple and obvious. The obvious is not always so obvious. So we just finally had to be like, oh no duh.

00;09;31;07 - 00;09;49;09
Speaker 1
That's one of those no dumb moments I've discussed in the past. So another kind of probe we all try to lean on is these wireless digital probes. You know, because we want to be able to sit in our recliner, have a beer or hang out with our buddies, or go back in the kitchen and work on something else instead of sitting there watching the pit all the time to know what the pits doing.

00;09;49;09 - 00;10;25;27
Speaker 1
Right. So we put we rely on these wireless probes that talk to the internet, and you've got all this other connectivity stuff going on, and the the real thing about these is unless you're cooking on a box store, really thin, cheap pit, these things really all have issues reading through thick steel like quarter inch plate. I know a lot of them claim to have had that have, overcome that issue, but it can't be further from the truth, because when you go and look at those ads on Facebook and you read through the comments, every other one is like, thing is garbage.

00;10;25;29 - 00;10;58;28
Speaker 1
Unless they're deleting all the bad comments, but they still have issues so they can lag or mis report the data as well. I've noticed this about a few of them is that I'm not going to name any brands, but I've literally had one that just takes time to catch up just because of the software that's in the, in the, the, the unit, the dial thermometer will pick up a faster swing than the the digital will sometimes or vice versa.

00;10;59;01 - 00;11;25;13
Speaker 1
So you just really can't you really can't rely on those things. So basically, what can we take away from this. The big thing is, is that these multiple temperature readings don't create clarity. They actually create a lot of chaos. And noise. It's really hard to sift through all of the data and trust the reliability of the device. So don't lose hope though.

00;11;25;16 - 00;11;53;15
Speaker 1
There's something else we can do and achieve that great barbecue. So we're going to introduce a topic here that I kind of stumbled upon by accident. And it just made complete sense to me what had happened. Something that in business that we you guys all know, I've been self-employed for a very, very, very long time. And the when you're self-employed or you're an entrepreneur or marker or something like that, you always hear the word KPI thrown around.

00;11;53;17 - 00;12;17;28
Speaker 1
And I was thinking about like, what are the things we should really pay attention to whenever it comes to cooking? Great barbecue. And the one thing that always frustrated me early on is it just seemed like the pitmasters I was learning from had this sixth sense, almost like this magic that whenever they looked at something they could just tell like make this one adjustment and everything will be fine.

00;12;18;00 - 00;12;42;05
Speaker 1
And they didn't seem to react emotionally. And that always blew my mind. And I just I wasn't born with that gift. I guess like a few of these guys, most of them are competition barbecue guys. And sure enough, you'll hear their name called all the time. And I just always wanted to be that ninja like Pitmaster that could just walk up and just understand what to do next, you know?

00;12;42;08 - 00;13;05;20
Speaker 1
Well, that's what we got. We got this thing I just kind of came up with off the cuff. I've never heard anybody say this before. I think, you heard it here for the first time called barbecue KPIs. In this case, it means something a little bit different. The word KPI does in business and marketing, KPI means key performance indicators, right?

00;13;05;23 - 00;13;28;27
Speaker 1
In this case we're going to call them key pit indicators. And this is this is a visual representation of what is happening in your pit. That's what I like I like to observe and like use my hand. I trust my hand is a thermometer. A lot of times you got to be careful. Don't get burned. But I do use my hand on that chamber to understand what's happening in there.

00;13;28;27 - 00;13;55;28
Speaker 1
I trust it more than I trust a dial thermometer. So these key barbecue key pit indicators, it's so new, I can't even say it. They help us answer questions that we all have. How is the cook progressing? Do I have bark? That's forming correctly? Is the fat actually rendering? Do I stay where I'm at, or do I change the course of what I'm doing right now to compensate for what I think is wrong?

00;13;55;28 - 00;14;23;03
Speaker 1
Right. And, you know, they're the one thing to remember is they do change the way I've got this road up. They do change depending on meat type. The kind of pit you're cooking on, you know, what temperature it is. And cooking style, the kind of pit you're cooking on doesn't have as much to do with it other than, like, if you're cooking in a vertical situation, you're going to have a lot more intense heat on the bottom than you are on the top.

00;14;23;05 - 00;14;41;02
Speaker 1
It just depends on the style of cooking you're doing, especially if your cooker operates with water in it. That's something else we can talk about in a future episode. For the record, I do not like cookers that have water in them. I think water pans are really, really, really destructive to your cook. Anyway, we're not going to read betrayal on that one.

00;14;41;02 - 00;15;20;07
Speaker 1
We'll have to nerd out later about that. So here's a couple real examples of how these barbecue KPIs kind of come to play. So observation is what these things are. So for instance, if you're cooking brisket at higher temps, your internal temperature, finished temperature is going to have to be higher in order to have proper render. That's an observation we can make early color and surface behavior, for instance, like the color early in the cook, before you wrap, before bark actually starts forming is a really key indicator of how your the rest of your cook is going to go.

00;15;20;07 - 00;15;43;11
Speaker 1
It's almost like predictive. If you can pay attention to that, you know, the the those mattered more than the air temperature. Because what we talked about earlier is the unreliability of the location of the thermometer. Is it six inches above the grate? Is it below the grate? Is it all the way to the left or in the middle or on the right, or are there three of them on here?

00;15;43;13 - 00;16;10;21
Speaker 1
The. Are they in the door instead of all the way at the back of your cooking grate? All of those things matter, and you can't see these things with the end of a thermometer probe sticking in air. So we have to be able to see these things. And that's what we're documenting here. So the early color inside of your of whatever you're cooking in and surface behavior like what's going on on the surface of the meat matter way more than air temp for chicken, for instance.

00;16;10;21 - 00;16;32;09
Speaker 1
One of the things we all seek, and I always called it a myth, is crispy chicken skin like define crispy chicken skin. Then go to a barbecue contest and eat the chicken that everybody turns in. I tell you, there ain't a bit of there ain't any chicken turned in at a competition, at a barbecue competition, especially KCBs, that has crispy skin.

00;16;32;12 - 00;16;49;29
Speaker 1
In other words, it doesn't crunch like a cracker. That does not happen. We're actually eating bite through skin, and a lot of times that bite through skin is soft. Mine always was if I Lord help me, if I turned in skin that I thought was going to be crispy, turned into leather. And so you just can't do that.

00;16;50;01 - 00;17;14;19
Speaker 1
So the skin texture can tell us a lot more than what a probe can in that scenario. As far as like doneness goes, ribs, one of my favorite ways to know how my rib cook is going is color. Pull back on the bones and, like, the flex of the ribs, what they look like when you pick it up slightly and bend it, you can just, like, read them like a book.

00;17;14;19 - 00;17;37;04
Speaker 1
It's one of the easiest things to learn quickly. So how do we put this into action in our next cook? Well, the first thing we got to do is simplify our measurements. My recommendation is to do this exact thing. If you have like more than one thermometer on your cooker and you want to leave them there because they look good, that's fine.

00;17;37;07 - 00;18;01;08
Speaker 1
But pick one of them and look at only one thermometer. If you'll notice on the Liberty 94 offset, we have one thermometer, and that thermometer is over at the collector end, and it's on the door side of the pit. And that thermometer reading. I can run that pit reliably. I know what the whole pit's doing based on my experience cooking on the pit and the observations I've made throughout using it.

00;18;01;11 - 00;18;27;27
Speaker 1
So I don't really recommend that you have more than one thermometer as far as like checking your your air temperature goes, the other thing you're going to have to have is like some reliable method of checking internal temperature of your meat, for instance, briskets and stuff. Now, the thing to remember here is I don't trust digital thermometers that like have internet access and all this stuff.

00;18;27;29 - 00;18;50;25
Speaker 1
The more the more readily available the temperature reading is for wherever you are, the less likely it is you're going to be paying attention to what the meat looks like. And these these key pit indicators that we're talking about here. So you want to you want to actually physically go and look for yourself. Right. That's that's kind of how I like to do it.

00;18;50;28 - 00;19;13;23
Speaker 1
And you know, stop comparing five readings at the same time. You know that we can't say one brisket is going to finish faster than the other. That's a law of nature. And, the best thing we could do is rotate those briskets here and there and not worry about, like, trying to chase the temp and make it perfectly even so that we don't overcook one and undercook another for tenderness.

00;19;13;26 - 00;19;40;08
Speaker 1
So we're going to shift our attention. Also, we're going to start watching color development and like surface texture, fat behavior, like how it's rendering. The another thing that is really hard to do, and you got to document it sometimes is the rate of internal temperature change. So like we're not just checking temperature to see where it's at. We're trying to also remember how fast has this thing cooked.

00;19;40;11 - 00;20;09;00
Speaker 1
That's a huge piece of, barbecue information that we want to pay attention to. And then how the meat reacts whenever you're sticking the probe in, like, is it's is it super tender? Is is the tenderness changing? As you do that you'll use these key pit indicators barbecue KPIs, to decide when to pivot in your cook. You know, if your indicators are green like like you feel good about your cook, stay steady.

00;20;09;02 - 00;20;34;01
Speaker 1
If, something doesn't appear to be right, you'll you'll adjust based on what that feedback is that you're getting from these KPIs. And just remember, this is barbecue. We're not in a hurry necessarily. We're chasing perfect our best barbecue, which is what I would call perfect barbecue. Your personal best barbecue. And invest time into that and you'll be rewarded.

00;20;34;04 - 00;21;00;19
Speaker 1
So small adjustments beat reactions, right. Don't be a reactionary cook that that right there will change your barbecue forever. If you learn how to lean into these barbecue KPIs. And that's what I call the barbecue soul, because that's what the guys had that I never did have. You know, whenever I'm cooking these days, I feel I sure feel a lot more comfortable.

00;21;00;21 - 00;21;23;23
Speaker 1
I've definitely picked up a lot of experience, you know, in my near 20 years of cooking barbecue. But I don't think that I am as good as I can be for sure. There's a lot of guys out there that are a lot better cook than me. And, you know, picking up these observations, the ability to just open the lid, look at that bark formation on those briskets, or look at the color on those ribs.

00;21;23;25 - 00;21;51;27
Speaker 1
Look at how the surface is dry. And just a little bit the moisture is evaporating at the right rate. Things like that is are are like these ninja skills that make your barbecue better than everybody else's. And that's the soul that we put into our barbecue, is the ability to feel it. You know, something else to remember. You know, whenever you're in these groups and you got somebody say in 203 is the perfect internal done temperature, it's not right.

00;21;52;00 - 00;22;17;09
Speaker 1
It completely depends on the temperature of your chamber. Some of my briskets I bring all the way up to two, 11, 212 degrees internal temp. So low and slow or hot and fast, it doesn't really matter which side you choose. But just remember, those are recipes, right? And recipes are training wheels. That's really what they are when somebody hasn't cooked anything, something before.

00;22;17;11 - 00;22;36;26
Speaker 1
So you want to make a good chicken parmesan, right. What are you going to do. You're going to go get a recipe for marinara sauce because I've never made that before you know. And so we're going to have to learn based on someone else's best documented experience. Sometimes it's not even really what they did. Sometimes they just came up with it from I lol.

00;22;36;29 - 00;23;03;23
Speaker 1
So just remember these things are training wheels and we're going to have to learn the cooks so we can adapt as we go. And that barbecue soul comes from experimenting. Learning your pit, learning how to adapt in the middle of a cook, but most of all, having fun with your cook. Great barbecue doesn't come from perfect control. It comes from understanding and responsiveness to how your cook is actually going.

00;23;03;25 - 00;23;29;20
Speaker 1
So you guys are probably all at this point very frustrated and asking, where are these barbecue KPIs? Where are they hiding? How can I find them? Well, I'll tell you for a limited time I'm going to put them up inside the smoke slinger pit owners group. Reason I say limited time is because I don't know that I'm going to keep that piece of information accessible in that group for very long.

00;23;29;20 - 00;23;51;12
Speaker 1
I'm not sure. You know, it's just one of those things. So I would, personally appreciate it if whenever you have the time, head on over to the Smoke Slinger Pit owners group. I have a I have a habit of dumping all kinds of recipes, like we talked about for training wheels and cooking timelines and stuff like that, which are examples of how your cook could go.

00;23;51;14 - 00;24;11;18
Speaker 1
I upload those pretty much weekly in that group. So for a limited time, like I say, you can go into that Facebook group and you can get access to this. And as I change the the copy on this thing and upgrade it a little bit, make it a little more polished, eventually there will be a full blown version of this available that you can get somewhere else.

00;24;11;18 - 00;24;34;00
Speaker 1
I'm not sure where yet, so. But anyway, yeah, the the barbecue KPI currently is a PDF document that you can download. So here's some key takeaways from this episode in case you want to, write them down real quick and remember them as you go forward is thermometers are tools, not the truth. These are not the rule in our cook.

00;24;34;03 - 00;25;01;28
Speaker 1
KPIs help you understand progress during your cook and help you develop those. So like ninja, like barbecue pitmaster skills. Observation always beats obsession. Like whenever you're obsessing about a thermometer, reading or trying to make one thing happen one little. Like if I. If I just obsess the entire cook about a certain temperature, I'm not paying attention to all the things that actually matter.

00;25;02;01 - 00;25;32;10
Speaker 1
Confidence in cooking comes from paying attention to these KPIs during your cook. And you know, for real, barbecue should be fun and definitely not stressful. If you're stressing out, then you're you're obsessing over something that you should not be obsessing about. Just chill out, take it easy for a minute and just observe. What am I seeing and hearing, like the sizzle or, other observations like that?

00;25;32;10 - 00;25;55;16
Speaker 1
What can I touch with my hands and feel and figure out how my cook is going with those, with those observation skills? So anyway, guys, I appreciate you listening to this episode. I hope someone found it helpful. If you have, please do me a favor and give us a review. And like I say, stars are great, but please leave me some words because the words actually tell me how I'm doing.

00;25;55;18 - 00;26;20;04
Speaker 1
And just so you know, I on purpose go long on these episodes because I know that if you're a real barbecue nerd, you're going to listen to the whole thing, right? That's what I do. Whenever I'm nerding out on something I want or I want to hear the whole thing. So if you truly found this episode extra especially nerdy and helpful, share it with somebody for me, if you don't mind, and invite one of your other barbecue nerd friends to listen.

00;26;20;04 - 00;26;27;06
Speaker 1
Also, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you and I hope you have a great day. Like I always say, see you next time.