Not a new smoker but have a new smoker!

[cprmom]

My name is Stephanie and have been smoking on a gas master forge for almost a year and had great success. A friend bought us a charcoal brickmann smoke n pit with a side firebox.

I have never used and type of charcoal grill in past. I have been reading about them and came up with few questions:
1. How much charcoal do I need to put in firebox? And in the charcoal tray in cooking chamber?
2. Do I need to make a chimney of charcoal?
3. It came with grills for firebox, what would be cooked on there versus in the cooking chamber?
4. Any additional info would be awesome!!!!!

I love this forum!

Stephanie

 

[noboundaries]

Welcome Stephanie!  Glad you joined SMF.  Sounds like you've had some tasty results and have a new toy to learn.  I'm sure one of the Brinkmann folks will be along soon.  If not, please post your questions in the Charcoal Smokers section and someone will answer all of them.

Please use the search feature too.  I did a search with Brinkmann Smoke N Pit and a bunch of threads came up. 

Have fun learning your new toy!

Ray 

 

[bluewhisper]

Welcome to the board! Sounds like you have something very similar to my Masterbuilt offset. You can run it in a few different ways.

Yes you can cook on the grates that go in the firebox. in that case you're running it like a small grill, with direct heat. You don't need much fuel, and you don't involve the main cooking chamber (People abbreviate that to CC here).

Then the main mode is to have a fire in the firebox, and food in the CC. Then you run the exhaust stack wide open, and control the heat by choking the air intake on the firebox. The amount of fuel you need will depend on what/how long you're cooking. You'll just have to get the hang of it. I suggest you start with something easy and inexpensive like chicken, before you dive into bigger stuff.

(edited to add, look up the charcoal basket mod, it's well worthwhile)

Finally, you can cook with the charcoal tray in the CC. You can run it like a great big charcoal grill, like if you're grilling for a crowd. If yours is like mine there will be an intake vent at the bottom of the end with the smokestack; this would be the only time you use that. And you can set the tray higher or lower, to control the heat. The sweet thing about that is, you can run it like a hibachi again, with just a modest little pile of coals in the tray hiked up close to the rack. You don't need to have all the racks in it (mine has 3) so you can easily reach around the rack or slide it aside, the get at the fire.

For that matter, you can also run it as a little wood campfire under the rack. You can heat up anything you'd have over or in a fire like a dutch oven or a kettle. When you're done cooking, slide the rack away and whip out the smores.