Category Archives: Grill Pros

Best BBQ Gloves for Grilling, Smoking and Fire

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Below we share with you our top picks for BBQ Gloves to help you handle meat, hot coals and protect your hands.

As the owner of BBQ Pro Shop, we often get asked a lot of questions about what we recommend and use ourselves. Many years ago, we made the switch to focus on finding the best BBQ Rubs, Grill Seasonings, Seasoned Salts and Sauces and stepped away from the world of BBQ gear. However, as an avid griller and smoker, we wanted to share with you the BBQ Gloves that have done us so right over the years!

  1. Tending Fires and Coals – When we started to use a chimney starter and deal with indirect cooking, we needed an all-purpose BBQ glove to help make sure we did not burn our hands when dumping coals, or setting grates onto the grill. We suggest buying welding gloves, you can buy them on Amazon or at your local Home Depot or Hardware store and they are perfect all-purpose gloves for grilling over hot coals as well. That way when they get soot and soiled, you will know to use them only for tending the flame.
  2. Pulling Pork and Handling Meat– For many years we have grilled or smoked our turkeys and handling those off the grill is never easy. That is why we wear Oil Shield, insulated NeoPrene BBQ gloves with 14″ sleeves. It allows for maximum comfort when handling a 20 LB turkey hot off the grill, as well as pork shoulders, and 18# briskets. Your hands and arms stay safe and they have a great grip on the meat as well. We often use BBQ Gloves to pull pork butts and shoulders as well remove bones.
  3. Rubbing or Seasoning Meat– We go to Costco and buy two packs of nitrile gloves which can be bought on Amazon or in most drug store chains. These are great all purpose BBQ Gloves for handling meat, applying rub, trimming and placing raw meat on the grill or smoker. They are disposable so helps avoid cross contamination on different meats. Love to use them when carving, serving or slicing, they add a layer of food safety and keep your hands from getting too greasy and smelling like whatever you touched last.

Below are some links to our favorite products on Amazon, with these three suggestion in your BBQ and Grilling toolbox, your hands will be safe and you can better enjoy what you do!

Embedded with Mike Mills of 17th Street BBQ

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Michael Gebert is one of our favorites when it comes to documenting BBQ. He is especially near and dear to us, since he hails from Chicago. His blog Aptly named Sky Full Of Bacon, highlights and documents his food adventures and writes for a number of publications. Sharing this video with you that came as a result of his embedding himself with Mike Mills at the Praise The Lard BBQ Competition, which is celebrating it’s 25th Anniversary this year. Enjoy the sights and sounds of what it is like to be at a BBQ competition. We have been down to Murphysboro, IL twice, have met so many great folks and have judged the KCBS contest in the past. If you ever want to experience something really special, this is one not to miss!

Enjoy more of Michael’s video’s at his Sky Full of Bacon Vimeo Site!

Sky Full of Bacon 21: Woodsmoke Nation from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Yazoo's Delta Q Style St. Louis Spare Ribs

Got My New Primo Smoker, Now What?

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Yazoo's Delta Q Style St. Louis Spare Ribs

My first cook of St. Louis Spare Ribs

Being a retailer and an owner of Primo Smokers and Grills, we are often asked the question, “I just got a Primo Smoker and I want to use it to smoke something, what do I do?” Well you are certainly in for some fun! Having been an owner who faced the same daunting thought of  “How do I get started?” I wanted to share some tips with you on how I started learning to use my Primo as a Smoker and not just as the best charcoal grill I have ever used!

I want to preface this by saying that in terms of the Big Green Egg fans out there, my competition partner in Pork Phat Posse is a BGE owner, and so the same advice applies for you too. Obviously the names and sites are different, but I have some suggestions for you:
  1. Join the Primo Grill Forum (PGF): Sign Up. Read up and try a few of the processes that they give you. The thing about the Primo that I have learned is that it is easy to configure and can be configured in all sorts of ways. Many of the members of the PGF have thousands of hours and hundreds of successful cooks. So if you are looking for experience and processes to call your own, this a great way to get started. Do some research on what you want to cook first, learn how to configure your grill, start your fire and use your smoker. They helped me out a ton and ultimately I had to dry out a few briskets, undercook some pork butts and burn some babybacks to find my groove. Expect to do the same.
  2. Heat Control: If you are going to be slow smoking meats, save yourself a lot of time and get yourself a BBQ Guru, call them to help you configure it and no need to go with all the bells and whistles on your first go. Buy a BBQ Guru that makes sense for you. If you are a purest, this may not be for you , but I found my BBQ Guru to be the difference between sleepless BBQ Cooks and sleeping like a baby!  It changed my success rate with smoking as I found it difficult to control and maintain the heat with out one.
  3. Make Sure You Have Proper Primo Accessories: Make sure that you have Ceramic D Plates and a set of Roaster Drip Pan Racks, I use a water pan on top of my D-Plates and have a lot of success with this method in conjunction with the BBQ Guru. Learned how to do this on the Primo Grill Forum, and there are many ways to do this, but having this system in place turns your Primo into a smoker or at least an indirect cooker, which makes all the difference.
  4. Anything but Brisket: As a beginner, all I wanted to do was cook a brisket, so I dried out a few before I did the research and was told that this was the toughest one too cook! So I started with Pork Butts and Babyback ribs, learned to rub them the right way, start a fire, and hold a temperature for long periods of time. Then after I got all those things working, I cooked a brisket and got better and better at it. So my advice is start with the basics and work your way up to the more challenging cuts.
  5. Have fun!: Manage your expectations. You are not going to be smoking Myron Mixon style on your first cook, so be willing to experiment and learn from your mistakes. I was told to always take good notes, from the start of the cook, to the end of the cook. This has helped me repeat my success and tweak for improvements when I cook. So if you remember to have fun, and that this is a learning process, your end results will only get better and better.
Stay in touch and enjoy! If we can help you, email us any time at bbqproshop@gmail.com and we will do what we can!

Grill Friends® Barbeque Grill and Cooking Accessories by Original “Grill Girl” Elizabeth Karmel

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A new site for Elizabeth Karmel’s Grill Friends® by Harold’s Import has launched with all the details on Elizabeth Karmel’s award-winning line of grilling tools and accessories. The official “Queen of the Grill” Elizabeth Karmel, was raised on the art of outdoor grilling and BBQ in North Carolina and turned her passion for fire into a full-fledged empire.

Karmel’s is the original “Grill Girl” look no further than her impressive list of accomplishments in all things grilling.  Since 2001, she has been educating women grillers (Girls At The Grill), launching her web site www.girlsatthegrill.com. Karmel has written barbeque cookbooks and continues to rite grilling articles for Associate Press, Bon Appetit and Everyday with Rachael Ray just to name a few!  Karmel hosts trips to America’s most famous barbecue regions and is the executive chef at NYC’s and Washington DC’s Hill Country BBQ.

Elizabeth Karmel’s Grill Friends® BBQ accessories are designed by a professional and someone who actual grills and does it professionally. If you are looking to make your grilling experience easy, fun and delicious, Karmel has all of the products and books to make it happen. the Grill Friends® Product line  includes the award-winning Super Silicone™ Angled BBQ Basting Brush, Flavored Wood Chips, Organic Grilling Planks and many more barbecue grill accessories. BBQ Pro Shop has been a supporter of  Elizabeth Karmel and is the exclusive online retailer of the Elizabeth Karmel’s web sites, www.elizabethkarmel.com and www.girlsatthegrill.com.  We are disciples of The Queen of the Grill and she is our Grill Girl!

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter @grillgirl

Elizabeth Karmel Shares “Secret Ingredient”

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Our favorite and BBQ Mentor Elizabeth Karmel Interviewed By The Q recently as the BBQ Expert that she is,  representing Hill Country Barbecue, and shares tells her secret for great barbecue at The Q from the South Beach Food & Wine Festival. We love that she shares the importance of “Feeling the love” of BBQ. Checkout this short video for some inspiration!

Elizabeth Karmel grew up in North Carolina where she was raised on BBQ. Karmel is frequently quoted and generally regarded as America’s female grilling expert. Karmel created Girls at the Grill in 2001 to share her passion for outdoor cooking with girls (and any willing guy) everywhere. www.GirlsattheGrill.com is committed to providing backyard cooks (and women who are tired of burnt chicken and shoe-leather steak) with simple easy-to-understand instructions, lifestyle information and recipes for everything from classic cookouts to gourmet grill meals. Grill Friends is a line of kitchen and grilling tools that solve problems that real cooks have in the kitchen, around the grill and at the table.