"Traveling Barbecue Is A Great Way To Supplement My Income"

"Traveling Barbecue Is A Great Way To Supplement My Income" FARM HOME Food 23-6-22 "We've covered a lot of miles with it the past three years doing custom barbecue cooking. It's a great way to supplement our income," says Steve Forseth, who recently sent FARM SHOW photos of his "locomotive" traveling barbecue, which includes two locomotive-shaped barbecues, towed by a supply truck decked out as a portable kitchen. The big barbecue is built two-thirds scale to a real locomotive and weighs 3,000 lbs. It consists of a 3-ft. dia., 5/16-in. thick steel pipe mounted on the axle and springs off an old Ford pickup. Meat is cooked on grates in the middle section of the pipe. There's no fire directly under the meat. It's cooked entirely by convection by a propane-fueled fire at the back of the pipe. The heavy steel door over the grates is raised or lowered by a manually-operated winch. "It draws a lot of attention wherever we go. We call it our æ9 Chow Line' after the Engine No. 9 song," says Forseth. "We're getting to be well- known around central Montana and are licensed to go anywhere in the state. "We use it to cook beef briskets and ribs as well as pigs. The big cooker can handle two pigs at a time. It takes about 18 hours to cook a pig so we start slow cooking it one day ahead. When it's done the meat is so tender that you don't even need a knife to pull it apart. One big advantage of our design is that we don't have flareup problems caused by dripping pork fat like you can with a conventional spit-type cooker. We roast a lot of potatoes and beans at the back of the cooker. "We've used it for everything from a customer appreciation day for a large recreational vehicle company - where we cooked for 620 people in 1 1/2 hours - to weddings and high school reunions. Next July we plan to serve 2,000 people at one event. We usually hire 10 or 12 neighbor women to help us put everything together. We pull it behind an old U-Haul truck which we converted into a mobile, self-contained kitchen. It's equipped with four sinks, freezer, cooler, refrigerator, and a 4,000-watt generator to run it all. "We've had so much demand that we built the smaller cooker which handles a small hog. We usually haul it on a pickup, but sometimes we hook the two locomotive cookers together when we show them at parades." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Steve Forseth, 1441 S. Second Rd. S.W., Fairfield, Montana 59436 (ph 406 467-2074; E-mail: kforseth@3rivers.net).

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