The Beginnings

I have always been a big fan of food - anyone who knows me will agree. However, I have a particular penchant for BBQ'ed and grilled foods of all sorts - steaks, chops, ribs, chicken, salmon, trout, veggies. If it's BBQ'ed or grilled, chances are I am going to like it. But I found that my BBQ'ing and grilling experience was not complete because there was this whole world of Kansas City style BBQ and Texas style BBQ that I was missing out on.

Living in a fairly small city (comparatively speaking), I couldn't find tender, succulent, slow-smoked BBQ anywhere and so I determined that I would just have to do it myself. The first step was finding a smoker. It sounded easy but turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. I searched online, read forums, went to the local Barbecue Country to check out all the different offerings but couldn't find something that had everything that I wanted at the price I was willing to pay. If it had one feature, it lacked another. Those that satisfied all my desires also demanded that I spend a couple of paycheques on them. I must have looked at a minimum of a dozen different models from half a dozen or more makers of smokers but I just wasn't completely happy with any of them.


Some of the more popular models I examined included Big Green Egg, Traeger, Primo, Bradley, Weber, GrillPro, Napoleon, True North and Smoky Mountain Series.


I had a few criteria that my smoker HAD to meet.

1. First of all, it had to have a smoking compartment large enough to handle a serious load of meat. While smoking is a thoroughly enjoyable experience, I would prefer to be able to smoke off a large quantity of food and freeze it for future consumption than to be forced to fire up my smoker every time I had a hankering for some smokey BBQ.

2. Racks had to be numerous and spaced close enough together so that I had many options in terms of which to remove depending on what I was going to be smoking. i.e. if I chose to do a turkey or something larger, I wanted enough other racks to accommodate all of my other smoked goods.

3. High quality construction

4. Sensible dimensions so that food is easily accessible from the door - i.e. smoker should not be too deep or too narrow.

5. Smoker should be easy to move around. I didn't want something that would require a team of people to relocate.

6. And of course PRICE! I was looking for something that wouldn't put too much of a dent in my wallet.

Examining each prospective smoker, I found that none were able to meet the cooking volume I was looking for. The ONLY series of smokers that were large enough were the Traegers. And even then, it was only their largest models that met my load requirements. Unfortunately, these units also run from $6,500 and up. I really was not willing to fork over that kind of cash. As for my other criteria, it was a toss up as to which smokers could meet which criteria but in the end, none could deliver on everything.

Clearly I had to build my own smoker if I wanted to have everything I was looking for without having to mortgage my house.