What Your Cooker Says About You

I make my living working for a car company, so a news item published on Forbes.com today caught my eye. It was an article titled "What Your Car Says to the Opposite Sex". That gave me an idea for writing a blog post about what our bbq cookers say about us.

When I moved to Tennessee 16 years ago, my first exposure to low and slow cooked bbq was at an all night pig roast near Fairview. They burned wood down to the coals all day and then cooked the pig all night and served it for a family reunion. The "cooker" consisted of several concrete blocks holding a wire frame that held old mattresses on antique bed frames. The cooker was born from necessity....it was what they had available at the time.

A few years later, I purchased a Weber Smokey Mountain, WSM for short, at a local hardware store for $179. I added a larger water pan to increase the capacity to two gallons for extended cooking times and started cooking my own bbq pork and brisket in the back yard.

The WSM holds temperature very well, you can use charcoal instead of wood coals, and the end result is very consistent. The cooker was relatively cheap, easy to use, and I still use it today. I could have purchased a bigger, fancier, and more expensive cooker, but I'm a "back to basics" kind of guy. The WSM is all that you really need to prepare better bbq in your backyard than you'll ever eat in a restaurant.

I don't own a pellet cooker or an offset smoker, so I won't comment on what those cookers say about their owners. But, if you own either type of cooker, I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.