Live-Fire Cooking

When it comes to barbecue, we believe in “live fire” cooking. At Llano & Rye, it means cooking the old-fashioned way with select hardwood, burning a wood fire in a traditional offset cooker, and taking the time to generate the heat, quality smoke, and convection needed for truly great barbecue. It’s a slow, painstaking, craft approach to outdoor cooking, but the results speak for themselves.

What Is It About Live-Fire?

A wide range of complex processes happen within a well-constructed offset cooker burning a well-managed fire:  wood compounds break down, flavorful smoke circulates and tumbles over and around the meat, fat renders and fuses with the meat and seasonings, and the surfaces of the meat dry in the convective smoke to form the classic dark, rich, complex bark that is the foundation of Texas-style barbecue. Some describe the sum of these processes as nothing less than magic, and we can't disagree. You can smell it long before the barbecue is ready:  there is a smoky, faintly sweet scent that wafts all around the cooker and the general vicinity - and that’s when you know something special is happening.

Live-Fire & Offset Cookers

You have likely seen an offset cooker before. It features a cook chamber made of a metal tube, a cooking grate, a smokestack on one end, and a firebox on the other end. The firebox is "offset" to the side of and below the cook chamber, and this is where wood is burned to produce heat and smoke. This design creates a chimney effect that pulls air, heat, and smoke from the firebox into the cook chamber, over and around the meat, and up and out the smokestack. It’s an outdoor, wood-fired convection oven where active airflow is essential to the end result.

A note of caution:  the offset cookers on display in front of "big box" stores are generally categorized by those in the know as “cheap offset smokers” (COS’s) and are notoriously difficult to cook on with consistency. This is due to their small size, thin metal construction, and often less-than-optimal smoke collector and smokestack designs. As measured by cook chamber volume, 16” COS cookers are often approximately 32 gallons and weigh 125 pounds: a very small thermal mass with temperatures that vary wildly in response to even the slightest change in fire size and heat. In comparison, the cookers used by most live-fire barbecue joints usually start at 250 gallons in volume, weigh 1,500 pounds or so, and go right on up to 1,000-gallon cookers that weigh in at 4,000 pounds or more:  they are much more thermally stable. Cooking on a quality, large-scale offset cooker is far easier than cooking on a run-of-the-mill, backyard COS.

Why Not Just Set It and Forget It?

There are many alternatives to cooking barbecue on an offset cooker – and for good reason. A traditional Texas brisket cook will keep the pitmaster working the fire for 12 to 14 hours, which requires a great deal of experience and judgment and a ready selection of seasoned hardwood appropriately sized to the cooker and the various moments and phases throughout the cook. Alternatively, you can just load up a pellet cooker with wood pellets, push a button, go to bed, and come on back when it’s done. Now, saying that one style of cooking and/or cooker is better for barbecue than another is likely to spark heated debate, and there’s no doubt that pellet cookers and other semi-automated alternatives to the traditional, live-fire, offset cooker can make good barbecue. But we’re not after good barbecue at Llano & Rye:  we’re after great barbecue.

If you're not convinced, look no further than the Texas Monthly Top 50 Barbecue Joint list. Throughout the entire list you will find legendary pitmasters who use hardwood, live fire, and large-scale offset cookers:  Aaron Franklin (Barbecue Jesus) at Franklin’s Barbecue in Austin, Tootsie Tomanetz (The Queen of Texas Barbecue) at Snow’s in Lexington, Matt Lowery at LJ’s in Brenham, Evan LeRoy at LeRoy & Lewis in Austin (a one-Michelin-star barbecue joint), Cooper Abercrombie at Bar-A-Barbecue in Montgomery, and the list goes on and on and on.

‘Nuff said about that.

If You Know, You Know

If you have had real, live-fire barbecue, you know what we’re talking about. If you haven’t (and many folks up here in New England haven’t), come join us and see what it’s all about: where there’s live fire, there’s great smoke and the promise of truly great barbecue. It’s definitely The Taste of Time Well Spent.

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