Wyatt Davis

The snow is finally melting, spring is coming (none too soon…), and with it comes the primeval urge to get outside and cook with fire: on the Weber Kettle, on the Big Green Egg, on the Traeger, on the Oklahoma Joe, on the Kamado Joe, on the Pit Boss, on the (insert name of your favorite outside cooking contraption here). This goes way back to the very beginning for us humans. Witness the Hartley Mammoth Site in the Chama Basin of Northern New Mexico. Archeologists think it may date to 37,500...

Before there was Llano & Rye, there was New Moon Seacoast Barbecue – my first foray into cooking barbecue at larger scale. Launching New Moon brought the addition of some bigger equipment to my cooker arsenal (enter Pepe the 100-gallon offset smoker), caused me to cut and store up more Seacoast hardwood, had me enlisting the support of family and friends to give the resulting barbecue a try, and kept me up on many a long night out by the cookers tending fires and briskets into the wee hours....

Does the choice of wood make a difference in live-fore BBQ? Yes – up to a point. Different types of cooking wood do have broadly differentiated flavor profiles, and an experienced barbecue enthusiast may be able to discern these profiles across different types of meat. But the seasoning of the wood, the quality of the fire, and the amount of time any given barbecue product is left “on the smoke” also make a big difference. When used properly, many kinds of hardwood have great results.