Outdoor Living & Lifestyles - fire pit - temporary

OK - Don't laugh too hard ---

I am considering building a temporary fire pit, on my driveway. I want to know how stupid is this?

The reason is as follows. I have a smoker. In doing some research on cooking with the smoker, I have found that wood embers are good to smoke with. Ok, so how to I get emebrs into my smoker? I could start to burn in my fireplace, and then carry the embers out of the house to the smoker - NO.
So I am thinking, I have a concrete driveway, I put together some cinder blocks and a grate and I urn my wood down to emebers there, and transfer them to the smoker

Any different ideas?

you'll destroy your concrete. buy one of those outdoor fireplaces or build one from a steel drum.

Can you let us know exactly what smoker you have?

Regardless of how you ignite your wood you somehow need to restrict the airflow to it so it smolders.
What your smoker looks like will dictate how you accomplish this.

To do what you want you can buy a patio fire pit as suggested to start the fire and place the well burning wood into a semi closed container to generate smoke.

One way I have smoked in a charcoal bbq is to burn about twelve briquets and place on top a packet of about one cup of wood chips wrapped in tin foil.
Just make a couple of slashes in the foil to let the smoke out and add to the briquets and place more wood packs as required.

The smoker I am building right now is electric with a thermostatically controlled element to set the cooking temp and a hot plate, pan and lid for the smoke.

The smoker I have is a Brinkman - with the fire box off to one side. It does have a air control valve. Last time I used it, after I got charcoal going, I added wood right into the fire box. The meat ended up tasting bitter.
I have a ton (well maybe a cord) of oak and hickory wood already split. I don't want to use chips which have soaked in water. I guess I want to be authentic, like the bar-b-q joints here in nc and just smoke my meat (pork) with wood.
That's when I read about the embers of wood.
heck - I'll try it once.
Just bought an outdoor fire pit, off of craigslist. will probably test it out next weekend.

I too have a Brinkman but the model without the side fire box.

It actually works quite well but am very lazy and am using a hot plate to generate the smoke..
The electric smoker I am building will allow very consistent smoke and even heat that I don't get in the Brinkman.

A little tip is that if your meat tasted bitter from the smoke you may not have enough air flow through the smoking chamber.
Opening and closing the damper on the firebox will control the amount of air getting to the briquettes making them burn hotter or cooler.
The damper on the chimney will control how much air flows through the smoking chamber.

I would just crack the firebox damper because it does not take much heat to generate smoke and open the chimney vent about half way to prevent bitterness.
If you like a delicate smoke flavor have the chimney wide open.

When you get the wood burning good spritz it with water to kill the flame then when you put it in the firebox close the air to keep the wood from catching fire.


Wet willow chips on briquettes doing a brisket:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v611/hal2000/2002_1110_132731AA.jpg


Hot plate generated smoke:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v611/hal2000/sausagesm.jpg


.

In case anybody was interested, we did smoke a pork shoulder this weekend, with great success. As mentioned above, we started out burning the wood in an open fire pit, once the wood was about 1/2 way burned, we transferred the wood (embers) into the smoker. Essentially we had to monitor two fires. It was a beautiful day, and I was able to keep busy in the yard. Pork tasted awesome - no bitterness at all.

Glad it worked out. :thumbup: