New to smoking - What to start with? - VERDICT

[Dman]

Cheers, I hadn't thought that about water but having topped up twice it's not caused any issues. The temerature has been pretty constant despite it being windy, it did look like there was a real lack of coals in the bottom so I put in an extra 20 or so about half an hour ago (5 hours after lighting) as I want to cook a whole chicken after this (one thing at a time!).

The pork's looking good from the outside, I'll give it another hour to ninety minutes and see what I've ended up with!

[Dman]

Ok...

So I started off with 4lb of pork belly as it was cheaper than the shoulder. I went with 90 mins per pound although the longer it went on I thought this was maybe too much, and this is how it turned out. I didn't have any rub so just used salt and pepper and mustard (bear in mind this was purely my first cook to experiment with). There wasn't much method to the coals either other than what I mentioned before, so maybe I'll do the minion method next time. I was using Supagrill lumpwood for this.

Temperature was ok but it was a bit windy so I was up and down a lot and adjusting the vents, it was mainly around the 250 mark though. I topped the water up twice and put extra coals on after five hours as I've now got a whole chicken on there to help season it.

It looked ok to me (but I'm not chef or food critic...), however it was definitely too dry. I also used 2.5 chunks of hickory and this was a bit too smokey so next time I'll try something a bit milder when I do a shoulder. I'm guessing a shoulder will probably do well with 90 mins per lb as it's thicker, but I'll have my thermometers by then so can gage food temperature next time round.

Not a bad effort for my first attempt by any means, especially as I'm a microwave chef. Onwards and upwards though, I'm loving it so far.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3uc46p6a0i5w3s9/Screenshot%202014-10-18%2018.45.25.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n9c01kkgbd3ibps/Screenshot%202014-10-18%2018.45.52.png?dl=0