Food Smokers and Smoking Tips/Tricks/Techniques

Overshot my charcoal amount in the Akron this morning so it was an hour fight to get temps right to put the dino bones on. Fired up about 5 lbs of bacon to hot smoke on the Weber, too.

 

Cooked up 25lbs for the party yesterday. Served it with a mustard vinegar sauce.

 

It's been at least that long of a fight to get me out of bed and started on mine.

 

So easy a cave man can do it. My BBs: 165f for 5 hours with a smoke daddy adding more smoke. 225f for 3 hours or till passing bend test. Like you, I will probably never cook ribs another way.

 

Fajita skirt steak

 

Love that color and bark! Ribs are probably my favorite use for our Meat Massage.

 

A guy I work with has either a Big Green Egg or a Kamado charcoal grill, said it’s starting to rust on the bottom, I’m hoping he prices it cheap! Waiting for the text with pics is driving me crazy! I’ve got a gas grill and an electric smoker, so I thought I needed a charcoal grill to have a well rounded assortment.

 

Very nice!

 

The rub was excellent man! This was the first chance I got to use it.

 

6.5# bone-in shoulder, hopefully done in the next few hours.

 

On since nine am

 

Kind of a good new/bad news situation over here. A couple of weeks ago, I had an "incident" with one of my smokers. Long story, but some stubborn coals and a massive wind turned my UDS (I was cleaning/prepping it that day) in to a burn barrel. A few coals were put in in the morning, just to get a little heat briefly to dry it out. About 5 hours later, some fresh coals were added for later that afternoon. The possibility of them lighting was not lost on us and even half expected/hoped for, so we always had someone home. Well, the lid wasn't fully seated (I was going back and forth with it for cleaning/prep) and a massive gust of wind (perhaps an updraft, too) knocked the lid off. The thing lit and basically turned in to a burn barrel. Given how it is situated, us having hoses/fire extinguishers, and always keeping someone home, the severity of our worst case scenario is always lessened, but we hit worst case scenario. No damage to anything other than the smoker (house, trees, lawn, deck, etc. are fine), but all the powder coating and the thermometers got roasted. We're talking about 5-10 minutes max and POOF! The smoker is still fully functional, just needs a fresh sandblast and powdercoat!

I guess the lesson is to take care with your equipment and be sure you're set up in a situation that if all does go wrong, you're worst case scenario threatens little more than the meat and your smoker. Had we left the house and had no one to check on it from time to time, it could have escalated even more. I'll get a picture of the drum shortly.

That's the bad news.

The good news is, with the wife's understandable paranoia, the equipment has moved further walk from the house and definitely necessitates me getting a wireless thermometer . Hoping to find a sitewide sale on Thermoworks and getting a Smoke + Thermapen. Drums run pretty damn solid, so I probably don't need the detailed monitoring, but this is a good excuse to do it .

 

Fired up the insanely easy to run WSM and dropped a busted apart pork shoulder butt in there a couple hours ago. I didn't bust it up....it fell outa the package that way...evidently they dang near filleted it to get the bone out. I should've paid better attention in the store. Oh well, it'll likely cook faster this way and there is more surface area to take the rub and get a strong bark.

Have 3 good sized pieces of water-logged pecan on the coals. Wasn't intending on soaking the wood, but it'd been sitting out on the deck this past week as it was pouring down.

Gonna put a couple slabs of ribs in there around 2:00pm. Gotta figure out what I'm gonna use for rub on the ribs. Not sure what's left in the cabinet. If there isn't a decent rib rub left in there, then I'll make up a quick rub. It seems my son is always grabbing bottles of rub and taking the with him over to friends houses and cookouts.

I do have a sack of Pit-Faced BBQ Rub on the way. I went with the spicy version. Looking forward to giving it a try.

The butt got my standard rub that hasn't let me down. Been using it for years...Bad Byron's. Love it on pork that I use for pulling....dislike it on anything else. One trick pony, but it does it's trick really well.





The DigiQ controller and Pit Viper fan makes this smoker about as easy to use as a microwave. Zero tending needed....just set it up and let it ride. The only thing easier may be a pellet grill.















Hoping I can plan my next large cook on a great weather day and use my offset. Much more fun on that thing...getting a nice bed of coals started and maintain them with a hickory split every so often and a temp range of 200-250 is fairly easy to maintain.

Also picked up a sixer of Budweiser Freedom Reserve. First one on deck.....not a bad sipping lager. Supposedly based on George Washington's own recipe.....I have no idea how close it is to that....or if it's simply Bud's attempt to cash in on the holiday....who knows. It tastes pretty good to me, though.

 

where did you get the Tacoma Bottle opener?

 

Hate that happened but glad it was contained and only damaged the smoker some.

 

In the 90's here last 3 days, record heat. Spending the weekend power washing the deck and been moving stuff around so no grilling except hotdogs and brats on the gasser last night. Think I said at one point you can never have too many grills. I might be rethinking that one right now. But it will go away once I'm done

PSA. Like Hawaii doesn't have enough issues already. More than 11 tons of SPAM recalled. Pretty sure some heads are going to roll in Austin, Mn. over that one.

Looks awesome! If I can get to the point where I can setup a grill today going to try do a skirt steak too. Now I'm hungry looking at these pictures despite the heat.

 

If you get it , you'll love it. But I wonder what is rusting, since itis a ceramic grill.

 

@Paint pig sells them on his etsy site.

This one is titanium and simply disappears in your pocket. Almost weightless....yet strong.


I don't even bother with twist offs (as the Freedom Reserve is)....too easy to pop 'em off with his bottle opener.


It gets a lot of use. Was recently over at a buddies house for a cookout and I thought I'd never get my keys back...they kept getting handed around to open suds.

 

Don’t let the heat stop you. Central Texas is hovering around 90-96 plus humidity

 

How the hell is iowa as hot or hotter than Texas? 96 here right now.