Tools of the trade

There are many things you can buy in your quest to become an award winning BBQ chef, but there are actually very few things you need in order to cook a delicious pile of meat in your back yard. Some of these items will get a future entry of their own.

Long handled tongs: You'll need these for moving things around your grill, pit or smoker. Don't use a fork. Poking your food is somewhere between bad and disastrous. And short handled tongs could result in lightly seared fingers.

Heat source: There is much debate to be had over what you use for heat and I may write about that at a later time. You want long slow heat. I've cooked over gas (some super hardcore BBQ enthusiast just died as I typed that), wood and various types of charcoal. While judges at competitions might be able to tell the difference, chances are pretty good your family and friends will have nothing to say about your heat source, because they will be too busy stuffing another pile of delicious food into their eager mouths.

Smoke: Where there's smoke there's fire, but it's not necessarily the other way around. To get good BBQ flavor you need some smoke. After seeing how liquid smoke is made, I'm not morally opposed to it the way I used to be, but I still like wood. I usually use maple, apple or ash because it is what is available in my backyard. I figure that's how people started (Somebody roasting a pig in 1775 in Virginia would not have roasted it over mesquite, because they couldn't get any), so that's good enough for me. Different woods do impart different flavors, so experiment. Different woods even work will with different sauces. I was never a fan of Sweet Baby Ray's until I used it to mop a pork shoulder that was cooking over a bed of maple. Maple smoke and Sweet Baby Ray's is a delicious combo :-P

Cooking vessel: Whatever you use to cook in or on, you'll want something that offers you a large cooking surface and room so you can have indirect heat. BBQ can't be sitting right on top of the heat source. I have a Kingsford barrel grill. For me it was a great value for the price. Next I'd love to get myself a nice drum smoker, either built myself or from a vendor. I've also done alright on a Weber kettle grill, but that took some creative work which I'll detail at some point in the future. There are plenty of high end pits you can buy and if you poke around online you can find plans for smokers, pits and grills you can build yourself. But for around 100 bucks you can get yourself a nice barrel style grill. You don't even need the external firebox. Not that it would be bad to have that, but you don't NEED it.

Other than food and spices, that's it. People go nuts over the particulars (lump charcoal vs. briquettes, lighter fluid vs. chimney, My wood's better than your wood, etc.) but at its core barbecue is simple and requires little in the way of gear, glitz and glamor.