Southern Smoke BBQ trailer: Not your daddy’s BBQ pit anymore
By Bill Mixon
Southern Smoke BBQ Team Pitmaster
southernsmokwbbqteam@gmail.com
www.southernsmokebbqteam.com
www.youtube.com/southernsmokebbqteam
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
When the average person hears the vernacular of Gravity Feed Fuel Systems, Type T Thermocouples, Proportional/Integral/Derivative Process Controls and Power Management Systems, their thoughts go more to NASA than to BBQ and rightly so, but no longer!
A stroll down the midway of Mike Mills’ great BBQ competition in Murphysboro, Illinois, this past weekend takes you right by all of these things in a broad array of implementations. This is not your daddy’s BBQ pit any longer!
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
Through the night, the quiet whirring of the insects is supplanted by the gentle whispers of PID controlled fans puffing regulated breaths of air into smoker fire chambers. Dizzying arrays of indicators, in a rainbow of colors, tell where the meats are on the time and temperature charts. And every now and again, the angry chirping of alarms wake napping competitors to tend an errant pit.
The Southern Smoke BBQ Team has taken the use of these technologies to a new level. Traveling in a 42-foot long, 16,000-pound toy hauler, the Southern Smoke team has assembled, arguably, the most sophisticated competition rig on the circuit today.
The trailer was purchased to provide a comfortable place for the team members to sleep while at the competitions. The value of comfort is not to be underestimated. The team members at Southern Smoke, Bill Mixon and Philip Davis, have competed under EZ UPS and dealt with the heat and cold and rain. There is a competitive edge to be gained when the team can be rested on Saturday. Those that have cooked at 2 a.m. in the rain and cold know what I mean. I know we do.
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
Before the trailer was even used, the 15’x8.5’ “garage” was converted into a commercial kitchen. Quilted stainless steel wall panels and all stainless work surfaces and storage systems lend themselves to looking bright and cool with an old school Diner motif. They look impressive but were actually installed to allow for easy cleaning and safe food preparation.
A three bay sink and overhead spray head allows for the quick cleaning of the largest stock pots and trays used in the competition. The entire sink unit pivots away from the wall to allow the use of a storage area located behind the sink. On a trailer, like a boat, every cubic foot counts.
There are two independent work areas for meat preparation and presentation box building. These tables are stainless and fold down for transit. Located at each workstation are knife sets and other necessities for the production of competition grade turn in boxes.
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
Above the workstation are restaurant storage racks with a full complement of stainless and aluminum pans, bowls, cutting boards, stock pots, and consumables that the team goes through in the course of each competition.
Also convenient to the work area is a commercial grade vacuum packer and an assortment of vacuum bags. These are used for marinades and for saving all the leftover meat after a competition. Southern Smoke, like most other teams, cooks far more meat than is required for the turn in boxes.
The rear wall of the trailer is 9x8.5 feet and pivots down onto four jacks, making a deck that stands 30 inches off the ground. The deck, designed with steel tracks that extend into the kitchen, permits a 2500-pound insulated smoker to be rolled out of the kitchen and onto the deck. An awning is deployed to cover the cooker and protect the cooks from the weather.
As you walk through the trailer, you cannot help but notice the electronics. In the living room, there is a 3’x3’ computer cabinet at the base of an entertainment center, complete with a stereo and flat screen television. In this electronics bay, a wall-mounted data acquisition system and Dell computer blinks their secret language back and forth while running the entire trailer.
Also located in the computer cabinet are the power monitors that track all the volts, amps, and watts, both AC and DC, used by the trailer. In competitions, power can be a bit hit or miss, and this system monitors the power quality. If something goes awry with the shore power, the system alerts the team via the onscreen displays. If the power supply is too weak, the team starts the 7000 watt generator, and it can run nonstop for four days.
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
The back wall swings out of the electronics bay, and all the hundreds of wires coming and going from the cabinet are within easy reach if there is a change or correction to be made. Quite frankly, it looks a bit like a nuclear power plant. Also located here is the uninterruptable power supply that can run the electronics bay and both pits for six hours.
Coming into the computer cabinet are cables from 3 temperature probes that provide sensory data from the trailer - ambient, cabin and computer. In addition to the trailer inputs, there are 12 temperatures coming from two smokers. These provide cooking chamber and firebox temps and four meat temps from each of two pits.
Going to the smokers are independent fan outputs that provide variable blower speeds for two pits. Between the computer cabinet and the BBQ kitchen, there is approximately 1200 feet of cabling.
The magic that makes all this work is a custom software application that runs on the Dell computer and controls the activity of the data acquisition system. This application was written by me and was my first effort in writing a software application.
The computer presents the acquired data in a very attractive and user-friendly graphical display that is distributed to a flat screen television in the BBQ kitchen and in the forward sleeping area. In the living room, the data can be displayed on the main television but is always displayed on the dedicated monitor located above the television.
Yes, that is right, four flat screens! With the exception of the bathroom, a team member can view the current condition of the two pits and cooking meats from anywhere in the trailer. This makes it possible for the team to rest at night and simply check the status of the pits by glancing at the monitors.
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
Of course there are things other than BBQ Pits that the team members enjoy monitoring. That would be FOOTBALL, specifically SEC Football. Each monitor is also connected to a satellite dome for Direct TV. Digital over the air channels are connected as well, allowing not one but two games to be watched. This is a serious requirement when one teammate is an Alabama fan and the other is an Auburn fan…
The final function of the Computer System is that of communications. Southern Smoke enjoys a WIFI hotspot allowing access to email and the internet. The team website is www.southernsmokebbqteam.com and its YouTube channel is www.youtube.com/southernsmokebbqteam.
Wrapping up the communications function of the Southern Smoke Trailer is the automatic emailing of the pit and trailer status. When the trailer is in storage, it sends an email each hour to the team detailing its power and internal temperatures. If the power goes out or is too low for safe operation, the system immediately sends an alert. During the competitions, the system sends an update every 15 minutes to the team reporting the pit temperature, pit fan, and meat temperature status for both pits.
An interesting note is that the team can also update the operation of the pits, i.e.; changing the temperature set points, remotely via an iPhone application.
So why do they do this stuff? What is the real gain to the competitive edge at the competition? Does the effort and money really work to a positive outcome? The answer to these questions is a bit tricky.
Most competitors agree that the best turn in boxes will be those produced under the most controlled conditions. Managing the meat preparation, pit environment, and time is essential to producing the winning entries. As professional level competitors, we all work hard to maintain these control points. We will do whatever it takes to make consistency, well, consistent. And this effort is always about trade-offs.
I remember the first pit I bought was a KLOSE offset that weighs 6000 pounds. It is a monster pit, and the key selling point was its ability to hold a stable temperature due to its tremendous mass. To hold that consistent temperature, you added wood every 30 minutes or so. To not add the wood simply threw the entire pit out of control, and the temperatures yo yo’d all night long. Don’t ask how I seem so clear on this.
Then came the insulated pits. Doubled walled and stuffed with rock wool, these pits are charged with charcoal, and their claim to fame was steady temperatures with hours passing before refueling.
What is the difference? Sleep my friends, the ability to rest in the hours between butts and briskets being loaded and ribs and chicken being loaded. Those 6-7 hours of rest made a lot of difference in the quality of the boxes we turned in Saturday morning. If you are exhausted by the night’s work, the little things will get by you. I think we will all agree that it is the little things that add up to placing fifth rather than first.
But, as I said earlier, there are always tradeoffs. Getting rest is made possible by insulated pits, auto-feed fuel systems and computers that manage the temperatures for you. But, to make it all work, you have to use high-density fuel. High-density fuel? That would be wood pellets or charcoal.
My good friend Randy Morris of the Fine’ly Ready BBQ Team did a review of the Kansas Royal and Memphis in May grand and reserve champions over the last decade and most, almost all, used natural wood. We try to compensate by adding wood blocks or chips to get that smoke flavor, but is it really the same? So sleep does come with a price, a flavor cost if you will.
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| Photo by William Mixon III |
Southern Smoke makes no claim that their trailer on electronic steroids is any more competitive than another’s. We use an insulated pit for KCBS competitions and a fine wood fired pit for MBN whole hogs. In Murphysboro, Philip, my teammate, fought the rain and chilly weather by adding oak and peach wood every 20 minutes or so to the Hog Cooker - and he did this all night long. I was asleep - with one eye on the monitor! The next morning I was fresh and ready to present to the on-site judges.
So, all the technology aside, the work still has to be done. The meats have to be selected and prepped and cooked just right. The flavor profiles have to balance, the boxes must be built and the judges need to get it right.
There really are no shortcuts to fine cooking. There are, however, fine tools. There are good knives and then there are great knives. There are well-designed pits that are stable and consistent, and there are pits that are not. Choosing what we use involves considerations of money and space and time and desire. Southern Smoke believes it has built a better than average tool in its trailer, but it is just a tool. We still have to do the work; this trailer simply helps us do it a bit better.
In the scheme of things, the bright lights and the emails probably don’t add a great deal, but they sure are fun, and fun is why most of us do this stuff. If we really didn’t love cooking BBQ, we would just go down to Jim and Nick’s and eat BBQ.
At Southern Smoke, we love cooking and competing. All the other cool stuff we do is just the icing on the cake. |
