If you’d like to enjoy real barbeque with traditional flavor and style, consider building a BBQ pit. When you cook your meat in a BBQ pit, there’s a greater concentration of smoke and heat. The flavor and aroma are unmatched.
This style of outdoor cooking is perfect for roasts and large cuts of meat. Depending on the size of your pit, you could even cook up half a cow or a pig. Keep in mind that this is a slow process and can take upwards of 10 hours to fully cook.
There are essentially two different kinds of open BBQ pits you could build: the traditional or the modern. The traditional open pit is inground and involves digging a hole. You then lay in your wood or charcoal and light it.
You can place your food on a skewer and hold it over the flames while it cooks. Or you can set up a grill over the fire to place the food on. You can even wrap up your food in foil and place it in the coals once the fire has gone out.
The modern open pit is usually an above ground BBQ. It’s generally built from concrete, stone or brick. A BBQ pit features a firebox where the wood or briquettes can smolder. You’ll likely want to attach a grill to the pit. Just make sure it’s far enough away from the source of heat so your meat won’t become overcooked.
There are a couple of ways you can cook your food in an open pit BBQ. You can use either indirect or direct heat. Direct heat cooking means that your food is cooked directly over the flame or heat of the burning coals. To help control the temperature, the fire is usually located on one side of the pit and the food is placed away from it on the other side. This method cooks your food relatively quickly and is perfect for tender cuts of meat.
Indirect cooking is also known as pit cooking. Cooking with indirect heat involves using a very low temperature to cook the food. First you build up the fire until the pit has stored up a lot of heat. The objective is to store up a lot of heat in the sides of the BBQ pit.
Once the fire burns out or you douse it, you place the meat on the grill. Then you’ll have to place a cover over the pit. The heat that has been absorbed into the sides of the pit will do the job of cooking the meat. This is a much slower method of cooking, and is best suited for tougher cuts of meat. Some people consider it to the best BBQ you can eat.
