Now why did you have to post up all those pictures of cooking meat. You got me wanting to go fire up the grill right now. There is certainly a learning curve to smoking meat. I plan on using cherry and pecan for my next smoke. I wanted to stick to apple, but I couldn't find any chips. I feel I wont be able to control the amount of smoke as well with the gas grill as you can with your homemade smoker. The gap between the lid and the bottom is to great. I am considering building a small dedicated smoker once I get the rest of the cooking figured out. My grand daughters boyfriend told me the other day he had one of those oval shaped oil barrels I could have. Bigger than I need, and I might just keep looking. Those oval barrels make great smokers, I had a coworker that used one and the company would pay him to do all the company picnics. Dang he was good at it. He lived in Lexington NC and that's the type of bbq he cooked.Also remember you dont want billows of white smoke coming out of the smoker. Best to have a slight blue to almost clear specially at the beginning. We all know what happens when thick smoke hits something cold , creosote! And you dont want to eat that . Another thing is I always pan the pork you dont want all that beautiful juice just getting burnt up. I use the juice after it separated from the fat as an addition to the pulled pork and as a dipping sauce
View attachment 837362
As much as this is a learning experience, one has to make a few observations as to what is taking place on the grill. A few things I notice is the smoke does escape around the lid, and not just a little bit. I have to keep adding chips to keep enough smoke to actually smoke the meat. Not knowing this when I started, there isn't much one can do about the smoke escaping when you have meat on the hot grill. Another thing I noticed was the meat was getting hotter on the side away from the lit burner. That didn't make a lot of sense to me, I would of thought the meat would get hotter the closer it was to the heat source. I can only suspect that trying to use a pan to control drippings, created a chimney effect, pulling heat under the pan and out the lid on the side opposite the flame. I am using two probes on each end of the meat, and another probe hanging directly above the meat. I believe the temp readings to be somewhat accurate, and can understand the difference between meat temps and cooker temps, but since heat rises, I don't think the temp probe hanging inside the smoker is representative of the heat at meat level on the grill. Probably not a big deal once a person learns just what temp the grill needs to read. I have tried 275f and 245f for the second butt and the 275f temp seemed to create more bark than the lower temp, and the lower temps stayed on the grill a few hours longer than the meat at the higher temp.
For this next attempt, a few changes I intend to make. For one thing, I am going to try and stuff something around the lid to control smoke and heat loss. Not sure how I will accomplish this, what ever I use cant burn or melt. Aluminum foil??? A second change is removing the drip pan and just laying the butt on the grill grate. A third thing is I plan on lighting two burners instead of just one. Youtube shows many folks smoking on a gas grill and everybody seems to just light one burner and for some reason they seem to think they have to light the one on the left and place the meat on the right on the grate. My grill has five burners and is large enough I can light each side and place the meat in the middle. Will it make a difference, well I do believe it will heat more evenly. My biggest fear is I wont be able to control the heat or get the heat low enough to smoke and not burn. I will have to babysit this attempt pretty closely and may have to shut off the second burner if it starts to scorch the meat.
decided to recheck the thermometer in ice water since the probes seem to be reading different. View attachment 838635
All 4 probes read 32f in ice water and 210 in boiling water, so now what?
Enter your email address to join: