Cooker fire at 3am taught me a lesson about fat traps

Last Saturday I was running a brisket overnight for a neighborhood cookout and woke up to flames shooting out the side of my offset smoker at 3am. Grease had built up in the baffle plate area and caught from a wind gust pushing the fire sideways. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and put it out quick but ruined a $120 prime packer. Now I'm scraping that baffle clean after every long cook no matter what. Anyone else had a grease fire scare with their offset?

2 comments

2 Comments

reesel5010h ago

72 hour dry brine and a 14 hour cook on my OK Joe went up in smoke last year because I didn't clean the drip tray right. @the_nathan makes a good point though - even after scraping mine the angle of the baffle was still trapping grease in the corner. Had to take a wire wheel to the inside lip to fix the actual channeling issue.

the_nathan12h ago

Respectfully, a grease fire in an offset at 3am sounds like a design issue more than a cleaning one to me. My old brinkmann would pool grease behind the tuning plates no matter how much I scraped it. I swapped to a vertical offset with a water pan underneath and haven't had that problem since. Maybe look into how your baffle catches that airflow before you blame the cleaning schedule.

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