5 Keys to Making Restaurant Quality BBQ at Home

I love Barbecue.  I can’t get enough of it.  The heat of the coals, the wisp of thin white smoke lazily rising from the smoker, the hint of smoke wood-tinged air, and of course the mahogany-colored meat itself! A great a plate of ribs makes Daddy happy!

The problem is, a plate of good “Que”, can stick you with a sizable tab if you always get it at a restaurant.  But it doesn’t have to be that way!

BBQ is truly a luxury.  We can satisfy our protein needs through many other less costly means (beans, peanut butter, chicken, etc.).  It’s true that we could cut BBQ out entirely.  But we here in the Heartland on FIRE household are firm believers in balance.  We don’t believe the true spirit of the Financial Independence|Retire Early (F.I.R.E.) movement necessitates elimination of luxuries.  I do believe F.I.R.E. principles call for thinking up alternatives to occasionally enjoy those luxuries that actually give us happiness.

Lifestyle optimization is one of the tenants of the F.I.R.E movement.  Essentially, it means you reshape your life to maximize those things that make you happy and minimize those that do not.  One of the tried and true tactics of lifestyle optimization is to Do It Yourself (DIY).  So how much moolah can you save being your own grill master?

We’ll get to that… but first, I want to dispel the notion that making consistently good (sometimes even great!) BBQ is reserved only for the professional Q-masters and restaurants using only the highest dollar equipment.

5 Keys to Make Restaurant Quality BBQ at Home

The notion that great BBQ is limited to the pros is simply not true.  In fact some of the best Que can be made right at home with relatively inexpensive equipment and simple techniques. The feedback I get from my family and friends is that my ribs and pulled pork stack up well against the fare of many local restaurants, with a couple notable exceptions.  Maybe (probably?) they are just being nice, but they do taste quite good to me.

There are only a few key areas that you need to pay close attention to and the rest is just… as my uncle would say:”Show Pipe”.

1. Quality Meat

A good quality hunk of meat makes or breaks your cook.  Fortunately, decent meat seems to be easy to find… at least here in the Midwest.  I have had great luck with the quality of meat and prices at Sam’s Club.  While I love Aldi, I’ve had some hit and miss cuts from here.  I look for vacuum-sealed (aka cryovak) fresh meat and try to avoid previously frozen product.

If you do use frozen, that’s OK, just make sure you fully defrost it before smoking it.  You also want to make sure the ribs have a decent amount of meat on them and are not too fatty.  A decent rack of baby backs will run about 2 to 3 pounds.

2. Give it the Time it Needs

Don’t rush it!  Each piece of meat will cook in a different amount of time, and generally, you can’t go wrong by smoking longer.  You need to know when its done.  The ribs are ready when they pass the “bend test”.  Pick up the ribs with some tongs by the middle.  If the ribs start tearing under their own weight, then they are done.  Pork butts (really shoulders, not rear ends and where the best pulled pork comes from) are done when it jiggles like jelly and pulls apart with little effort.

That said, as a general guideline I budget the following times for various cuts of meat:

• Baby Back Ribs, 3 to 4 hours.
• Spare Ribs (or St. Louis Style), 4 to 6 hours.
• Pork Butts , 2 hours per pound… and I won’t go less than 12 hours.*

*Sounds crazy, but I do these longer cooks overnight.  Once your grill is dialed in, it’s pretty much set it and forget it, so I don’t lose any sleep over it… literally.  If you are using a charcoal smoker, become familiar with the Minion Method.

3. Don’t Overdo the Smoke!

I know you want that smokey flavor.  The smoke ring is King! But if you use too much smoke wood you will, with 100% certainty, ruin even the best hunk of meat.  I strongly prefer using wood chunks (not chips).  Some woods are much more potent than others (I’m looking at you hickory and mesquite).  For ribs I usually use a combination of 2 pool ball-sized chunks of fruit wood, like apple, or cherry, to 1 piece of oak or hickory.  For a big ‘ole chunk of meat like a pork butt I will up this to 3 pieces of fruit wood and 2 chunks of oak or hickory.  I recommend scaling up to these amounts as you may find that your tastes are more sensitive to smokey flavor.

4. Hold that Temperature Steady!

To get the results you are looking for you absolutely need to keep the smoker temperature at the right temperature throughout the cook.  You don’t want to be baby sitting the smoker during a 12+ hour cook.  I’ve done it and it’s not worth it.  Most cuts of meat require cooking temperature in the range of 200 to 275 degrees F.  I personally try to hold at 225 degrees for most meats.  This temperature range is critical to render out fat without toughening up the meat.

This is where a good quality smoker comes in handy.  I didn’t say expensive.  There are lower cost smokers that perform well (a converted 55-gallon drum with a lid, grate, and vent might set you back under $150 and can turn out some competition worthy Que).  Some people stack cinder blocks or dig holes in the ground… it doesn’t need to be fancy.

My setup is a Weber Smoker Mountain 18-inch.  It’s hard for me to oversell how much I love this rig.  It’s a charcoal smoker that has the ability to hold a consistent temperature for seemingly eternity.  I’ve gone 20 hours with one load of charcoal before (it was bursting at the seams).  Plus, Weber’s porcelain-enamel coating is nearly indestructible.**   Mine has been going strong for over 5 years so far with no issues.  New, this Weber goes for $299. I have a regular Weber kettle grill that I got second hand over a decade ago that converted to a fire pit.  It’s coating is still going strong.

**I have an old Weber kettle that I received second hand over a decade ago.  I converted it into a fire pit, but the coating is still intact!

5. Seek Advice!

Recipes, Techniques, and Advice abound on the internet.  Take advantage of this wellspring of info.  There are a number of BBQ forums that you can ask any odd question you can’t find an answer to. However, someone else has almost certainly had the same question you have.  Personally, my go-to resources for all things BBQ, including recipes, equipment reviews, and cooking methods, are two websites: amazingribs.com and thevirtualweberbullet.com.  If you can’t find what you need at these sites, then you probably don’t need to find it to begin with.

Bonus Key – Sometimes Less is More

Notice I didn’t talk about rubs or sauces.  If you’ve paid attention to the items I discussed above, the need for rubs or sauces is just icing on the cake.  Let the meat shine!  Sometimes all you need is some salt and pepper.  Complex rubs and sauces can hide a great piece of met.  Not that there is anything wrong with a great rub or a sauce, but sometimes less can be more.  Start with some simple and subtle seasoning and gradually build from there.  Experimenting is half the fun, plus you get to eat your research!

Alright, enough of my shouting and blabbering.  Well, here’s one more shot of the finished product:

How Much Money Can you Save?

Let’s consider a dinner for two consisting of a half rack of ribs and two sides (potato salad and cole slaw).  In our household we average about 9 rib dinners a year, so that’s the number I am using in the analysis.

To serve the role of the restaurant in this analysis I am pulling numbers from one of our favorite local BBQ joints here in St. Louis.  Salt+Smoke.  They are outstanding (especially the brisket!) and I would recommend them to anyone without hesitation.   Other notable local BBQ spots include Pappy’s and Bogart’s (part of the same ownership team), and Sugarfire.  These folks serve some killer Que.

A half rack of ribs with 2 sides at Salt + Smoke goes for $16 a plate at this fine establishment (this is a typical price point locally). Here is what a straightforward rib dinner costs us:

Item	Cost
(2) 1/2 rack plates and two sides	$32.00
Tip (20%)	$6.40
Tax (8%)	$2.56
Mileage (42 mile round trip, car gets 32 mpg and assuming $2.50 per gallon)	$3.36
Total	$44.32
Annual Total (9 meals)	$398.87

Compare that to the costs of DIY BBQ:

Item	Cost	Equipment Life, years	No. of BBQs	$/BBQ
Grill: Weber Smokey Mountain	$300.00	10+	90+	$3.33
Replacement Grate	$25.00	5	45	$0.56
Kingsford Charcoal (2)19.5 lb bags	$19.00		4	$4.75
Ribs (3 pack of Baby Backs)	$26.00		3	$8.67
Potato Salad (DIY)	$4.00		1	$4.00
Cole Slaw (Bag Mix plus DIY dressing)	$2.00		1	$2.00
Tax (8%)				$1.86
Mileage (11 mile round trip, same mpg and fuel costs as previously)				$0.86
Total				$26.03
Annual Total (9 meals)				$234.26

That’s a savings of $18.29, or 40% each time I fire up the smoker!  Roughly $160 per year!

The Intangibles

The savings with being my own pitmaster as outlined above are only half the story here.  I am a tinkerer.  I love learning new skills and trying to hone my craft.  BBQ has become a triple threat hobby to me.   It always me to scratch my creative itch.  I can do it at home, which means I can still participate as a husband and father while I am doing it, and it meets a need (putting food on the table in this instance).

If I devote my time to mastering BBQ, that time cannot be used for other more pricey entertainment options.  Therefore, my entertainment costs go down, and the money I spend on the BBQing can actually be categorized as food/grocery costs.

By channeling the F.I.R.E. principles I:

• Reduce the cost of something that I love
• Increase the time I allot to this activity
• Decrease my spending on entertainment and dining out, since I have less free time to spend on these categories

In the end, BBQ brings me happiness.  By going the DIY route I get to do it more often and spend less money each time I do it.  That is a WIN WIN situation if ever there was one.

Thanks for reading!