British BBQ Society Forums

Hi guys,

I did my first slow cooking attempt on Sunday at it worked really well. I was doing the 2.5kg slab of ribs that I talked about before. I watched the BBQ Pit Boys video on youtube for a 2 hour cook as I did not have enough charcoal for a real low and slow. I grilled them for about 8 mins on each side and then moved them so they were being heated indirectly, the drum temperature was around 225 f for most of the two hours and I used about 2 kgs of my own home made lumpwood charcoal (yes I am that cool ). In the video they said to cook it at 300-325 but I could not get that temperature without dumping all my coal in at the same time which I was not prepared to do.

My question is quite a geeky one,

How many kgs per hour would you guess or know from personal experience that a 55 gallon oil drum size smoker would burn? How many kgs in a hour, or another way round is how many kgs do you use for the whole process and how many hours is that and I can work it out.

I tried the minion method and it seemed to work quite well, maintaining a pretty good temperature if a little low throughout. I am thinking that I just need to up the burn rate and I will get a higher temperature.
I will upload some photos when I get the chance and can figure out how to do it.

Any responses/thoughts you guys have are welcome

Thank you all

I can't comment on burn rate for a UDS however I can say that if you require a higher temperature using the minion method then you need to start with more lit, try dumping a full lit chimney on top. There is a limit however after which the minion will not give you what you need

2hrs @ 300f won't be long enough, you want to try cooking lower for longer with a rack of ribs. I'd recomend cooking between 225f-250f and follow the 3-2-1 method and you'll get much better results.

With fuel usage, each cooker is different as materials, build quality, size & style all make a difference then you take outdoor conditions it makes it impossible to calculate you just have to go from experience. i belive some of th guys using offset smokers use about a chimney stack of charcoal every couple of hours, which you get around 1.5kgs per load.

Also what type of thermometer are you using? If you have a standard bi-metal thermometer it will most likely be wrong. (The ones in my WSM & ProQ are both 30f out) if you are able to remove the thermometer boil some water in a pan and stick the probe end of your thermometer in. if it is correct you should get a reading of 212f. Doing this will allow you to know how far out your thermometer is and allow you to compensate for this with your temp' control.

Hi Ed,

Ok yes I need to calibrate the temperature gauge to see how similar/different it is. Ok so you said roughly 1.5kg per hours so it looks like it burns between 0.5-1kg per hour of charcoal. Very interesting, thank you.

I have also decided to use a thermocouple to measure the actual temperature the ribs are experiencing, its a k type thermocouple and I just place it next to the meat and then the sensor wire travels out to the the handheld device for my reading.

Maybe I will do some more this weekend.

Thanks guys

I've found that I can get a full 15-20 hour burn on roughly 12-15 pounds (5.5-7 kg) of lump.

As to your question of the temperature, where are you taking the temp from? If it's from the side of the grate, it can be 25-35*f lower than the actual temperature at the center of the grate on a UDS.