Bullseye Question about patio 410

[Greg Jones]

One additional observation about Academy. It’s an absolutely premium event from recteq. Forget about what you think of recteq’s shipping partners or the quality of their app/servers, or whatever. Academy is First Class all the way. They don’t wait for people to show up to start the grills-the grills are all new and they wouldn’t risk a delay starting one that may have a malfunction. Whatever you may think of your recteq experience, Academy is stellar.

 

[Beach Bum]

100% accurate. It was a first class experience.

 

[SmokeZilla]

So did you hear a lid pop when you attended Academy? I’ve never experienced a lid pop either, with nearly 5 years experience as a recteq owner. But other people obviously have experienced this, and you ignored my question-what is to be gained with starting the grill with the lid closed? I would think coating the inside of the grill with the acidic smoke of the initial startup would be enough incentive to keep the lid open for a few minutes? Seeing all that creosote dangling from the inside of the lid should be incentive enough to open the lid.

My bad for not addressing your discussion points in my response.

My answer: True remote start capability adds to the overall efficiency of my planning and my overall fun. I can be at work, out running errands, or on a hike with the wifey, and start my grill with no problem or manual intervention required. I especially like this feature because if I am at a bar having pre-cook out festivities, I can come home to a device that is at temperature and ready to receive whatever I want to put on it. I wouldn’t be able to do that as efficiently with the chamber open for 30 minutes then the subsequent cool down to get the temps regulated due to the controller trying to “keep up” with the temperature profile and loss of stability. Absent this capability, I am typically experiencing 30 minutes of time between start up and cooking which adds up for me as I am usually using my smoker 4-5 times a week since Covid and my wings got clipped, which would equate to ~2.5 hours of time that I would have to dedicate to being near the cooker when it is started. I agree I could interrupt my day, come home, start the Bull, and depart. But why would I want to do that? One of the advertised options is the remote start feature. Not using this feature would remind me of when I was living in northern Maine (Limestone to be exact) and it would be -20F on any given winter day. I would get dressed, go outside and start my car. Then go back inside, take off the outdoor gear, drink a cup of coffee, and then put the gear back on when the car was warm and ready for my commute. If you ever have the pleasure of going to the NOAA site in Antartica, you realize the value of staying put, haha. I couldn’t wait to install remote starters in my vehicles and to this day won’t buy one without it and I live in southern California where they aren’t even needed! As I get older I realize too much of my time is being wasted on non-value added events when technology can be a decent solution for me, especially since I can use the warm up time to engage with my community or just walk on the beach and reflect on the greatness of being alive in lieu of babysitting the smoker. That is why my stick burners (vertical and an offset) are not used often). My cook counts on my Bull are over 600. If I consider I use the remote feature 50% of the time (which is conservative), the lost hours dedicated to the start up process almost speak for themselves. That is why if you look at my posts, I always advocate for keeping any device of this type far away from anything that is flammable and no where near anything you care about. I am so into my beliefs that I am thinking about getting rid of my Lynx Professional Series gasser to purchase their updated unit or a Hestan with fully automated controls (if they can ever get the bugs out). As my ancestors always told me, “…you can make more money but you can’t buy more time”.

To address your statement regarding “acidic smoke”, even Jeremy Yoder has retracted (nay, “walked back”) his statements about dirty smoke. My grandfather had a ~3,000 sqft 2 story smokehouse on his farm. We would load it with 10-15 fully prepped cows, a half dozen sheep/lambs, and a dozen pigs, and smoke them for almost a week until they fully cured and could be cut and kept for 12 months unrefrigerated (think Virginia Hams or dry aged/cured meat). During the process, we would add whatever fuel source we found that was “clean” and not once did dirty smoke come in as a discussion point. He did this (amongst other things) for over 40 years. Further, if you look at the square inches of space offered in a typical smoker and the ventilation (either though the chimney, drip bucket spout, or the many gaps they typically have that leak around the perimeter of the lid and pellet fill container, you would have to be using kerosene or some other volatile agent whose VOCs or media would attach and re-infest the proteins (think about gas droplets falling back down on the protein during the cooking process still at a temperature higher and heavier than their original combustion point or with a hyper saturation level to create a lingering fog that would not dissipate even when you open the lid to add your food, to be able to convince me smoke was “dirty” at the beginning of an 18 hour brisket or pork butt cook and remained detectable in the end product. I also like the creosote point you made as this is a real, tangible consideration for cleanliness but I am not sure if it leads to lingering dirty smoke. One trip to Youtube (I won’t perform surgery without it), reveals pits all over the world that have sludge, grime, and build up from many years but oddly, they require maitenance but I am not aware that they should be stripped down to the bare metal to serve food. Heck, I’d be impressed if many of the places just cleaned their grates each day. (Note: Someone can let me know if they have had their pits decommissioned until they are sparkling clean, for this reason.) As you look at the cook’s smoke absorption until the Millard reaction of the most common proteins, absorption may occur but most pellet grills don’t infuse enough smoke and need to be supplemented. I would argue that placing a smoke tube adjacent to your proteins introduces a more concentrated level of “dirty” smoke than the chamber of the RT700 that was started remotely and empty. If used/started properly, any residual startup gases or VOCs would have dissipated long before the protein hits the chamber in my opinion, unless you have a completely sealed chamber absent any/all ventilation, YMMV. When I attend BBQ competitions or visit famous or backwoods smoked meat restaurants, you’d be surprised how much dirty or green wood they use in their processes. This includes wood with mold, fungus, bug infestations, vermin droppings, and other miscellaneous organisms including animal urine because they stack it in volume and don’t isolate it from access. They also use green, wet, and pieces that were painted to mark the boundaries of where the cutting should occur during the wood’s harvest I would even bet the manufacturers of pellets are not subject to any FDA approvals or audits to ensure sanitary conditions exist in their factories or to identify safe limits of contamination or restrictions on the use of recycled materials that may contain micro-plastics. By the way, this is the same FDA that allows a minimal percentages of rodent hair and feces in hot dogs sold across the US. From my research, there is no such thing as 100% virgin pellets. Even on this post there have been sightings of foreign material and debris coming out of sealed bags of pellets that have been purchased “fresh“ from the store. Should they go undetected, right into the firepot they go. And don’t get me started on the restaurants that use old pallets and recycled materials to start their cookers. Some places also also use paper products, moldy tallow and lard saturated paper that has been exposed to animal blood and bacteria, impregnated with grime from their kitchen’s cooking surfaces and even their discarded garbage and cleaning cloths as accelerants for their cooks, all of which ignite before a pellet or similar compacted fuel source would. I’ll not even mention the staples, nails, and other metallics that are also included in the delivered wood pile when you buy it by the truckload. In reality, I can start a dirty fat ladened rag so much faster and with fewer BTUs than my own pellet tube that seems to take a torch to get going. If you look at the old stand by for many backyard chefs, the venerable Weber 22” kettle, for generations people used petro-chemical soaked briquettes from unknown sources containing unknown substances, they purchased at the local discount stores, as accelerants. I’ve even seen people use gasoline from their cars as a starter fluid, and you never heard about dirty smoke. Perhaps they were talking but the sound was being drowned out by my chomping as I ate the food. From my many years of life, traveling to ~109 countries and hitting almost every state in the US and most of its territories, I am still waiting to reject a meal because they cooked the food and the “smoke” was dirty. But that is just me. I have however, sent food back for being unsanitary (hate to see worms unless they are on the menu, lol), under-done, over-done/burnt and for other reasons.

Just my point of view and I am hopeful others will share their experiences. Sorry for the lengthy prattle, football has been pretty boring today.

 

[SmokeZilla]

The Academy is on my list of todo’s. It seems very popular and I could always use a tune up on my skill set. Do they prepublish their menus? I would like to pick one with exotic meats being perpared (e.g., live fish sashimi, Croc or Gator, snake, nutria, and similar). I’ve cooked my fair share of the more common items (fish, fowl, squirrel, raccoon, possum, bison, javelina, etc.) but my trips to asian countries opened a new world of fun and flavors that I would like to master.

 

[Gonefishin]

My 340 gets like Greg’s pretty quick.

 

[Greg Jones]

The Academy is on my list of todo’s. It seems very popular and I could always use a tune up on my skill set. Do they prepublish their menus? I would like to pick one with exotic meats being perpared (e.g., live fish sashimi, Croc or Gator, snake, nutria, and similar). I’ve cooked my fair share of the more common items (fish, fowl, squirrel, raccoon, possum, bison, javelina, etc.) but my trips to asian countries opened a new world of fun and flavors that I would like to master.

The menu is published-chicken, ribs, and brisket. It’s a competition event, assuming they haven’t changed the format since I attended. There are 5 teams, the three recteq chefs are team leaders as well as two guest BBQ chefs that additionally teach during the event. The team meats are submitted to judges that score them just as in an actual BBQ competition.

 

[Greg Jones]

Academy recteq just put out a brief video earlier today on the Academy experience.