The craft
Low-and-slow smoking is not a passive activity. The Big Green Egg is a kamado-style cooker — a ceramic vessel that retains heat exceptionally well and creates an environment where temperature can be held with precision over many hours. But precision requires understanding the machine. The BGE is controlled entirely by airflow: the bottom vent feeds oxygen to the coals, and the slider vent on top controls how much heat escapes. Getting those two in balance — and keeping them there for twelve or fourteen hours — is the foundational skill.
Most of that understanding came from trial and error and YouTube. No single cook teaches everything. The variables are numerous: how the charcoal is loaded, how the wood chunks are positioned, ambient temperature, wind, humidity, how much the lid has been opened. Each cook adds to the mental model.
Skills acquired
Airflow & Temperature Control
The BGE is a closed system governed entirely by airflow. The bottom vent controls oxygen supply to the fire — more air means higher temperature. The top slider vent controls exhaust — restricting it retains heat but also retains moisture and smoke. Dialing in a stable 225°F–250°F range requires understanding how these two vents interact, how the ceramic mass responds to changes slowly (not immediately like a gas grill), and how to make micro-adjustments without overshooting. This is learned behavior, not a formula.
Brisket — the most technically demanding cook
Brisket is the benchmark cook for a reason. A full packer brisket is two muscles with different fat content and fiber direction running in opposite directions — the flat and the point — and both need to finish correctly at the same time. The stall (typically between 150°F–170°F internal temperature) is where water evaporation cools the meat faster than the fire can heat it. Understanding that the stall is normal — and not panicking, not raising the temperature, not opening the lid — is as much a mental skill as a technical one. Timing the Texas crutch (wrapping in butcher paper) to push through the stall while preserving bark, and then resting in a cooler for one to two hours before slicing, determines the final result as much as anything that happened in the cook itself.
Wood Selection & Flavor Building
Smoke flavor comes from the wood, not the charcoal. Charcoal provides heat; wood chunks provide flavor. Hand-sourcing wood from fruitawoodchunks.com means selecting specific species — Colorado peachwood is a go-to for its mild, slightly sweet smoke that complements beef without overpowering it. Understanding when to add wood (at the start of the cook when the meat is cold and most absorbent), how much to use (more is not better — bitter creosote is the result of too much smoke), and which woods pair with which proteins is a genuine area of knowledge.
Web Development — first site built from scratch
yhbbq.com was the first website built and shipped. That meant learning HTML and CSS from the ground up, understanding how to structure a multi-page static site, and deploying it on Cloudflare Workers. Embedding a Vimeo video required learning about iframe embeds, responsive 16:9 wrappers, and autoplay behavior. The contact form runs through Web3Forms — a third-party service that handles form submissions without requiring a backend. Each piece of functionality required understanding a new concept and wiring it together correctly.