Hello
He are some of the experiences when BBQ smoking for the first time.
I think the guys on youtube from the US of A, need to be more clear when they are talking about temperature. eg 220 - 250 degrees. Being from another age and from the UK, I took this as celius. I realised today that IT IS faranheight. This would have save me a lot of trouble and sweat at 4am a few week ago when I fired up an homemade smoker. Tried to get the beast up-to and maintain a temps of 225 degree celius. No wonder I struggled and gave up after 8 hours. Lesson learned.
Fire up my recently bought WSM today and put a 6.5lb pork butt and half a rack of ribs on it.
With my experinece of the my earier disaster and trials with my homemade smokers.I decided that when it came to the amount of charcoal to start off with, more was best. I put 10k in the pan and put a full lit chimney in the centre of the unlit charcoal 11k in total. This worked quite well as the smoker reached 225 degrees F quickliy and it was still running hot after 9 hours as the charcoal burn;t from the centre outwards. Used apple wood chunks instead of the chips for the smoke seasoning.
Struggled a little with controlling the temperature of the smoker. Put this down to opening the lid a lot and messing around with the vents. Next time I will leave it well alone when it get to the ideal temp. Will also need to invest in some digital temperature monitors for the meat and for the grilling area. I don't trust the temp probe built into the dome of the WSM. Does anyone know of a good make?.
As with my earlier attempts and from today. The pork butt after 9 hours in smoker did not get close to a internal temp of 190 degrees F or 88 degrees C. I used the rough guide of 1.5 hours per pound and the highest the internal temp of the pork was 75 degrees C. It was getting dark and decided to finish it off in the oven as the temp of the pork had peaked at 75 degrees C for the last 1-1/2 hours of smoking. I'm putting this down to not leaving it the smoker long enough, the pork but being put on the lower grill near the water pan, opening the lid too often and not being able to read / adjust the actual temp near the grill of the smoker. Has anyone got any tips of how to get the meat to the right internal temp.
The smoker was putting out a lot of white smoke from the lid seals and dome vent for most of the time. Is this normal or is there something that I need to do to correct it?
Apart from the above the end results of ribs and pork butt tasted quite good, there was a good smoke ring and the pork butt had a good bark. Though it did taste a little bit of charcoal. It was pitty that by the time it came to eating the end results I wasn't really that hungry. Looks like pork on the menu for the next few days.
That me all smoked out for now. Thanks Juddi.