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.
You have two basic choices in open BBQ pits, modern and traditional. The traditional BBQ pit is essentially a hole in the ground. You then fill it up with wood or coal and set it on fire.
You can cook your food by placing it on a skewer and holding it over the fire. You can also lay a grill over the flames to hold the meat. You can even wrap up your food in foil and place it in the coals once the fire has gone out.
A modern BBQ pit is typically constructed above ground. Stone, brick and concrete are the most common materials used for building such a structure. There’s a firebox in which charcoal or wood can be set on fire. 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. When you cook with direct heat, the wood or coals in the firebox are still actively burning, and you place the meat on a grill above the flames. In order to manage the cooking temperature, many people locate the coals at one end of the pit and the food at the other. This is a fast cooking method and works well for smaller cuts of meat and hamburgers.
Indirect cooking is also known as pit cooking. Indirect heat will cook your food at a low temperature over a prolonged period of time. 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. You then need to cover up 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. Many people believe this is the best method for authentic BBQ flavor.
