People find out I do the cooking on weekends and the question comes fast. What should I buy. Like there's one right answer and I've been keeping it from them.
My smoker is nothing to write down. An offset that was here when we got here, a little rusted at the seams, a door that never sat right until Caleb put a bolt through it. It holds heat about as long as it wants to and I have learned to argue with it. Forty weekends a year we understand each other.
That's the part nobody asks about. The cooker you buy is not the thing that makes the food good. The thing that makes the food good is walking out there at six in the morning with a cup of coffee and deciding you're going to pay attention to a fire for eight hours. The machine is just where you put the fire.
The question that comes up most is the ceramic one. The eggs, the kamados, those heavy round cookers that hold a temperature like a secret. People agonize over which one. And I can't tell them, because I don't run one, and I'm not going to stand at my own smoker and pretend I do.
What I can tell them is that our friends at Pints, Forks & Friends actually did the work. They put Kamado Joe and Big Green Egg side by side and sorted out the price, the pieces that come in the box, the way each one wants to be cooked on. It's more homework than I was ever going to do, and it's honest about the fact that both of them are good.
Here's the part they say too, the part that matters. The best cooker is the one that pulls you outside. The fanciest rig in the county does you no good if it sits under a cover all summer because lighting it feels like a project. A cheap one you actually use will feed more people than an expensive one you're scared to scratch.
So that's my recommendation, for whatever it's worth from a woman with a rusted offset and a bolt for a door handle. Buy the one you'll light. Then light it, this weekend, before you've talked yourself out of it. The race will be on. The chili's already going. Somebody will wander up the driveway hungry, and the machine will have almost nothing to do with why they stay.