Has anyone built their own backyard pit out of firebricks, bricks or cement blocks? I read the article on AR and followed all of the links and didn't really find a comprehensive site with good build instructions. The 'net is rife with a lot of information on pizza ovens, whole hog smokers and grills, though. I'm looking more for a straight up smoker and have thought of scaling down a whole hog pit for butts, chickens, and ribs. There seem to be two schools of thought on constructing a brick pit: the "open pit" where coals are shoveled under the meat (some call this the Kentucky open pit but it seems to be technique used in SC as well) vs. the style where a fire is built on one end of the pit and the heat moves under and through the meat towards a chimney built on the opposite end (a lot like an offset). Both pit styles seem to rely on simple covers made of sheet metal or even hardwood. There are a few restaurants in the US that still cook this way... Ruby's in Austin, Texas, Grady's Barbecue in Dudley, NC, and Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, to name a few.
I just need some reliable schematics to get me started and am not looking for anything too complex. I've seen a third style of pit, which is a vertical smoker built out of bricks where the fire is built at the bottom, but again, I am having trouble getting a sense of dimensions and how far the meat should be from the fire. Lots of variables to isolate (i.e. how much reflective heat do you get from bricks, heat retention, fire box construction, airflow, etc.) The calculator I found for chimney and firebox dimensions is for metal smokers, unfortunately.
Challenges aside, this seems like a fun father/son DIY project where you could build a backyard "stick burner" for less than $500.
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