Food Smokers and Smoking Tips/Tricks/Techniques

I haven't looked into it too much myself, but I have read somewhere along the line about fire bricks towards the cooler side of the grill??

 

http://pelletheads.com/index.php?topic=3838.0

 

Very tender! Happy with the results for the first one. Looking back I wish I had butcher paper to wrap.

 

As previosly mentioned fire bricks help. Sort of. I put them in mine and I think they help the temp rebound faster when you open the lid and let heat out. They don't necessarily help with the issue of one part of your grill being hotter than another. That just seems like it's a function of airflow from the fire pot. Mine is hottest around the back and front edges, where the drip tray ends. The air rushes up from below in those areas and is naturally hotter. Place your food away from the hot spots.

 

I agree but when you have a 12 lb brisket hard not to fill the entire grill. What I notice is there is a 30-50 temp different between sides. Some how I need to close that gap. I don't think fire bricks are going to do that.

 

Water pan in the hot zone?
Specific heat and all that

 

8lb Boston butt
6.5lb Boston butt
8lbs of drumsticks
Plus a beer


The pork smoked 2 hours per pound at around 220-240F for a total of 16 hours. The chicken went for just under 3 hours at the same temp and was glazed huli huli style. The beer lasted about 15 minutes.

 

So I just don't have time to scroll through all 151 pages of this thread.. It's look like y'all really know what you're doing but I'm wondering if anyone uses a BIG smoker at all? I've got a huge tank I'm going to cut up in the coming months and plan to make it 2/3 grill 1/3 smoker. I have NO experience smoking but plenty of need for it. Most of my friends and I hunt and love to cook and make jerky, we all agree grilled and slow cooked is the best way to go so when I had this tank turn up (for free) I jumped on it.


So my question is, who's got experience with big setups and are there any pics on here??

 

How big of a tank are you talking about?

 

if i were smoking meat professionally, i'd have a large tank. i mostly smoke for my family and for small parties at the house (20-50 people). i have a 22.5" smokey mountain an can fit more than enough meat on it for that. i've cooked 21 pounds of boston butt on 1 rack before, so theoretically i could do ~40lbs at a time. if you estimate .5 pounds per person that would feed 80 people. the 8lb butt i showed above actually fed around 30 people, so you could say .25 per person, or ~160 people for 40 lbs of pork. where you really run into space constraints is doing flat items, like ribs or brisket, but there are solutions for those too (racks to stand them up or additional racks to stack them on.

tl;dr... if i had the room and money for a huge smoker, i'd probably have one. the bigger they are, the more fuel they take (wood, charcoal, propane, etc).

 

I've got a tank that's around 350 gallons. Like I said, looking to cut it so its 1/3 smoker 2/3 grill

 

0 experience with any grill or smoker that big. I assume it'd be a stick burner. It would take a lotta charcoal to get enough heat.

 

Couple questions for people here before this memorial day weekend.

I smoked two racks of ribs at seperate times this past weekend. The first rack I smoked offset for about 2.5 hours, once those were done I wrapped them in foil and put them in a small igloo cooler to keep them warm and such for about 2 hours. I then put another rack on the smoker and smoked them for about 2 hours. Both with the same rub on them. The second rack I took off and wrapped in foil and put in the cooler for about 30 minutes.

The second rack was a lot tougher than the first and the first rack was absolutely perfect fall off the bone goodness. Does the wrapping in foil and putting them in a cooler make that much of a difference or could this just have been a drastic different in the cut of meat?

I am planning on either doing a pork butt this weekend or a smaller brisket so wanted to know if wrapping either in foil and putting them in a cooler makes much of a difference for the tenderness and such.

 

For brisket and pork ass I say yes! Wrap and rest. I've never rested my ribs in a cooler.

I use a 4-1-1 method for my ribs...
4 smoke, 1 foiled, 1 back un-foiled.

 

Going to have to try this method out I believe.

 

It works for me! Look it up.

It's actually referred to as the 3-2-1 method, I just change it up for my liking.

http://amazingribs.com/tips_and_technique/texas_crutch.html