Kyle Riggen had wanted to cook some chicken wings but he doesn't want to wait four hours with his electric smoker just to get them. So he made some experiments in order to cut down the cook time and tried other methods to see which could bring out the most flavor into meat. After that, he decided to build his own pressure cooker.
Riggen debuted his first K-Rigg Pressure Smoker a year ago. The pressure is built using a small, propane-fueled engine. There’s a pull starter at the bottom, like you’d find on a lawnmower. The engine’s exhaust, which goes through a catalytic converter, is what pressurizes the system.
The cooking chamber is a simple steel tube. A larger tube surrounds it, and a gas burner sits between the tubes. The smoke comes from wood chips sprinkled on the bottom of the cooking chamber. The steel tube gets hot enough from the burner below to ignite the wood.
With his design, the pressure cooker can go up to 450 degrees which can cut down the cook time for meat like a rack of ribs to 30 minutes and a ten-pound brisket to just under two hours. That's a significant leap from his old electric smoker. But how would the meat taste? Find out on Texas Monthly.
(Image credit: Daniel Vaughn/Texas Monthly)