Food Smokers and Smoking Tips/Tricks/Techniques

I've noticed that on my 26" kettle too, but I've decided to try not to notice it instead of fixing it.

 

32deg outside.
Never smoked whole fish but was told to open them up and smoke them until the eyes turn white.
Overnight in the ice cream pail of water. 1/2 cup curing salt, 1/2 cup brown sugar. (dissolved separately)
Letting them dry out 1st.
Going in the electric. 200F for 1.5-2hrs (hopefully)

 

Clean? No. That's flavor.
Wire brush it or scraper (mentioned above) to knock out some bigger pcs. but that'd be about it.

 

The black flakey stuff is likely creosote and should be cleaned off now and then. Google will tell you a multitude of ways to clean it so you can keep on cooking safely.

 

Flavor Town baby.

 

Just as long as it isn't falling on the food.
We don't need THAT much flavoring.

 

That's not flavor.. that's danger.

 

2 hours later.
Looks good to me.

 

Had a Green Mountain Grill smoker the paint started flaking off it. Started on the outside and began flaking on the inside. I didn’t want any getting on my ribs so I contacted GMG. They told me to scrape off the chips on the inside then season it with vegetable oil at 350 for 2 hrs. Did that and never flaked again

 

Butt went on about an hour ago. Trying something different this time and doing the Meat Church “Mexican” pulled pork recipe. Basically, use hot sauce instead of mustard as the binder and season with their fajita seasoning which is luckily one of the two I have from them lol.

 

Costco had brisket at $3/lb yesterday so I splurged and got an 11lb little guy. Waiting for the egg to heat up and we're going to give that a try today. Haven't done one yet.

 

Mid day snack, smoked for about 30 minutes and finished in a pan. Pork!

 

I clean mine now and then just to get the build up off, never a deep cleaning it looks like new type of thing. Just a nothing is falling on my food type of thing.

 

Offset - I clean out the ashes before each cook. Not after, I've seen embers live after a couple days. My new pellet pooper - probably will do about the same. Vac it out before each run, no idea on when I need to clean the hopper if at all? That'll be a learning experience next year once I use this thing a lot more.

 

As long as you're emptying the hopper of old pellets and not letting them sit in there a long time you should never have to clean the hopper itself out. Mine is stored in the garage and gets used year round so I don't have to worry about the pellets getting wet or moist and swelling. That can cause auger damage (like snapped auger) so that's the main thing you have to watch with the hopper. Many newer ones have a clean-out that you can dump the pellets from if you need to empty it or want to switch woods.

With my pellet pooper the thing I clean the most often is the drip tray that takes the grease to the holding cup or whatever yours uses. My Traeger I used to wrap it in foil every use which made it easier to clean. This one since it's just a cheaper temp unit I just end up scraping it to clean. Suspect when I go back to a better unit I will go back to wrapping it again (I buy my foil from like sams in the wide variety).

 

Mine's bare right now, only used it a couple times, I just cleaned it out and then washed it in the sink. I AM tempted to see if it goes into the dishwasher but I like the idea of just a foil wrap... I've seen they make "size specific" trays that go in there but that seems a waste. Scrape it out 99% of it goes into the trash, dishwasher or hand wash and then back on it goes. But I've only used it twice, and mostly pretty lean stuff overall, haven't done a butt yet.

Shed, same idea. I can easily be convinced to use this in the wintery months too. Just got it a couple months ago.

This is what Pit Boss says for mine. I am 99.99% sure I don't have that clean out door, I have the tabletop. I'm not too fussed, I've used hickory for turkey, cheeses, and a bunch of other stuff you "should" use apple for, and been happy with it. I'll use apple when the hickory runs out just for funsies.

 

Ya our smoker gets used year round here, rain, sun, snow doesn't matter. Good food knows no season lol.

I use Lumberjack comp blend so I never really need to change the wood type on mine.

As for their instructions I would say like for cleaning out ash and stuff you can see how it builds up. Mine with the pellets I use burns pretty clean. I think I end up cleaning up the ash and stuff maybe once or twice a year and it's always before I start a session so I know NOTHING in there is going to cause me issues.

The grease cup, lots of places sell foil liners so it make clean up easy. Pull out liner dispose and put a new one in (which reminds me I need some more and need to change mine I had a grease overload last cook lol).

 

Mine's in the shed, against the wall, but I have doors I can open up and set it up against.

This has been cleaned up a bit, but the idea is here. I think this was from just getting it built and set up to see how it fits. It blows the smoke out the back. Yeah, the shed gets a little smokey but whatever. As long as it's not a southerly wind, rain/snow won't get blown in.



Still have to go outside to get to it, but I could be convinced to use this in the winter a lot more than my stick burner that's out in the elements and needs me to maintain the fire

I have Hickory, and a bag of apple, once the hickory goes I'll probably get competition for 99% of my stuff, I want to use apple for the next cheese I smoke though.

The pellets burned pretty clean, there was some, but not a significant amount. I could easily be convinced to leave what was there. I'm just sharing what Pit Boss says, and highlighting I don't think I have a dump panel.

Yeah they're relatively cheap, but I'm not shy to get in there and dump it into a trash can and then clean the bare metal. I'll probably do a foil wrap like you talked about though.

 

My brisket from yesterday turned out just okay.

Learned some things

1) I need to practice my trimming, I didn't do a great job at it so some parts had funny textures from un-rendered fat or too thick of fat. It was cheap though, $3/lb at Costco
2) My head was probably too low for the first while. Egg thermometer didn't like the sub-freezing temps and it took it awhile to preheat and get steady. Also eventually added a grate temp probe and realized how far off the dome temp and grate temp were
3) Trimmed and seasoned stuff saturday night, then as soon as I put it in the fridge wife and I remembered we had made dinner reservations. Whoops. Got up at 5:45, had it on the egg around 6:30, and my hope was that I could pull it and rest it by the time we had to leave at 4:30 but I was probably an hour off. So I shut the grill almost all the way down before we left, when it was at like 185-ish, and hoped for the best. Got home about 2.5 hrs later and it was at 180. No idea how high the temp got but I'd say 2/3rds of it was buttery soft, the other 1/3rd could have used more time.

Somethings I was happy with:

1) actually got an OK bark to it
2) smoke ring is real nice and pink
3) flavor is great
4) it was only a choice, not prime, so I'm happy with the texture on the 2/3rds that got fully up to temp

Overall, 4/10, still plan on devouring the full pan.

 

In the dead of the winter when I'm most happy to have a pellet pooper over stick burner. I'm all for both of them until it's snowing, wind blowing hard and dark of the night. Then I'm all about yup just need to make sure the hopper is full of pellets.