[quote]borrek wrote:
[quote]bond james bond wrote:
Could someone please tell how to use one of these properly. A friend of mine gave me this smoker. I use it to grill with charcoal but that’s it. I tried doing chops using the little compartment with wood chips and controlling the draft with the flap on top of the chimney. It was a total failure lol.
I want to try the rib recipe on this thing and this should be perfect.
Thanks for any help.
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You’re right about using the small compartment for the wood chips. You should have a small charcoal fire going in there, with the chips. This grill probably originally had a smoke box, which is a little steel box that both the chips and coals go in. Sometimes people even use special electric smokers (think like a soldering iron in a tin box with wood chips)
I see a thermometer on the top of the main grill. For the ribs in this thread, the ideal temperature is 225 degrees. Hot enough to breakdown the fats, but not so hot that the water immediately steams out. Likely since the thermometer is a little distance away, you should aim for a reading of ~190 to ~200. You can use the dampers on the chimney to keep the fire in check if it getting too hot and another small trick for temp control is to put an aluminum cooking pan of water right above the coals. This will absorb some of the heat energy, and at the same time keep the grill more humid to prevent drying of your meat. Probably what went wrong with with the porkchops is that the actual temp near the meat wasn’t high enough so you were in effect cold-smoking like they do for salmon or cheddar.
You could ignore the small compartment entirely, and just build a charcoal fire on the left, and put your ribs on the right so the smoke passes over the meat on its way out the chimney. The only thing you’ll need to do is make a little table with 2x4s on it so that you can take the whole metal grating off to add more chips and coals. Use some oven mitts, remove the grate and place it on the 2x4s, then add your smoke and put the grate back. If you use the water pan, don’t try to balance it on the grate, remove it entirely and then move the grate. Otherwise, you run the risk of dumping 200 degree water on yourself, or on the coals, killing your fire.
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Your right about cold smoking the chops. They were on there for hours and tasted terrible lol.
I might just use the KISS principle and ignore the small compartment for now until I get better at this. Luckily the grate is in two peices so that will make it alot easier to add coals. The water basin is a trick I never would have thought of. The ashes are left over from the last time I used it and I will clean it out before I use it again. Thanks for taking the time to type out those instructions.
I used the brine recipe for some chicken yesterday that a poster was kind enough to put up in another thread. Oh man was it juicy…and most importantly, simple lol. I’ve used buttermilk to tenderize chicken before but this brine thing is cheaper and adds flavour.
