Saturday, March 28, 2009

Tips for Outdoor Cooking in a BBQ Pit

By Paul Cameron

If you're looking for an authentic barbeque experience, you should try using an open pit BBQ. When you cook your meat in a BBQ pit, there's a greater concentration of smoke and heat. The taste is out of this world.

This method of cooking outdoors is ideal for larger cuts of meat such as a roast. If your pit is big enough, it's possible to cook a whole pig or a section of beef. 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 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. Another option is to wrap the food in foil and lay it in among the coals after the fire has died down.

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 install a grill at a level that isn't too close to the coals so the meat won't burn.

With an open pit BBQ there are two ways of cooking your food. 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 goal is to build up a lot of heat in the interior of the pit.

The fire is then put out and the meat is placed onto 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. Many people believe this is the best method for authentic BBQ flavor.

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