[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by reefermadness

A smoker is something I have been thinking about for a while....

Any tips or suggestions on buying one?

Also for ribs....what is the difference to say putting wood chips in my bbq set at 275...??

I guess some cooking explanations for a smoking noob....

hmm lots of difference, although I used to use the bbq to smoke for years.. first for ribs you want it at 225 and you want continual wisp of thin blue smok. you do not want wite billowing smoke.

for buying a new one figure out what you going to make and how much time you want to spend smoking.

I smoke a lot but I don't always have the time to site and babysit the smoker which is why I am retiring my lump burner and building and electric one out of an upright freezer. I am building it with a PID temp control so I can set the temp and go back 5 hours later (time to make BBribs) or 6 hours for spare ribs. also when you do pulled pork you could be at it for anywhere from 8 hours to 18 hours depending on how big it is. so it is nice to have a reliable smoker that you can turn on and go to bed, waking up once and a while to reload the smoke generator. I am also designing one of thoes that will go for 8 hours between reloads.

for a store bought solution in electric the "master built" are deicent and there is a large amount of people using them on the internet. The bradly is good but I can't recomend it as you are stuck to using there "pucks" of wood so you are limited in what kinds of wood you can play with and they are expensive.

if you don't mind babysitting the smoker when you smoke then you can buy one that will burn wood or charcoal, here is where the choices become endless, I would recomend not to be tempted by cheeper smokers.. theres a reason there cheep. my brinkman was givent to me as a christmas present but I had to do ab out 6 hours of modifications to it to make it work deicent and it is still a finicky unit.

another thing to think about is cold smoking. if you want to be able to do this you need an external smoke generator.

finaly if your handy you can build one.. I built my first one from a old dish washer, others have used ovens and fridges/upright freezers are very popular. also you can look up UDS (Ugly drum smoker) made from a old 45 gal drum. take a bit to build and runs off charcoal but people turn out some good BBQ with them.

here is the best smoking website I have found yet.
http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/forum/

Steve