fire going and let it rage for a good 45 minutes or an hour—as long as it takes. This is also a good thing to do if you haven’t used your cooker in a long time and don’t clean it regularly and the inside is covered with rancid grease or mold. The process is roughly the same as any modern, self-cleaning oven. After burning it out, you should treat it like a cast-iron skillet. Wipe away any smoke or ash and then apply oil to the surface. I like to use tallow, which is beef fat from our brisket cooks. But any sort of vegetable oil will work just as well. You want to season the metal with the oil, as it helps form a protective layer that slows down the onset of rust. As for regular maintenance on our cookers, once a week we use shovels to clean the bottoms thoroughly of any grease or burnt bits that have fallen down there. We take a wire brush to the grates and then hose the whole thing off. If you’re cooking on your smoker only periodically, you’ll want to do this after each use. Another thing you’ll want to do after each use is to shovel the ashes out of the firebox and dispose of them. (Use a shovel, don’t hose it out. Do not get water in the firebox.) Leaving them in there, especially on smokers made of thin-gauge metal, greatly accelerates the rate of rust. And once your firebox has rusted out, it’s hard to repair.
LAST THOUGHTS Building, modifying, and thinking about smokers is a big part of what I and any serious barbecue cook does. We’re always looking at our cookers and thinking of ways to make them more efficient, cook more evenly, and—for the restaurant—cook faster. That said, once you get one that’s in great tune, you’ll know it. Then the trick is to use it over and over, every time taking note of its cooler and hotter zones, the way it cooks in different weather conditions, and always trying to get a sense of the way heat and smoke are flowing through there when the door is closed. The more you work with a smoker, the more you’ll understand it. That’s when you might get the hankering to modify one you’ve bought. And after you’ve reached the limits of what homemade modifications can offer, that’s when you might consider building your own. In any case, you end up having a pretty intimate relationship with your smoker. You should know it well and hopefully spend many happy hours together.