Rob:
I am mostly on board with you on your rants. I agree; the food doesn't
much care about a 30 or 40-degree difference. I also agree the process
should be fairly simple. I'm also on board with you regarding most you tube
channels. Nearly all the cooking-related stuff on YouTube is crap! Most
of them take far too long to tell you what you need to know in a much
shorter time, and most don't really empart much useful info even if you have
the patience to wade through it all. This channel, at least so far, is not
your typical youtube channel. The guy gets to the point, and seems to know
his stuff. So far, I like it. No weird ritchuals, expensive equipment,
etc. He's also of the opinion that bbq should be a simple affair.
The kind of temperature difference I'm talking about here is a lot more than
50 degrees. The pork roast saw a temp of around 400-425, while the turkey,
at the peak, never got above 250 at most. As far as the type of smoker,
it's made by Weber, and I think the model is called a smoky mountain,
cooking grates ar e 22 inches in diameter, like a standard kettle grill.
It's what I think is referred to as a verdical smoker. There are three
racks or shelves, with the bottom rack for charcoal, the middle shelf is
where the water pan goes, and the top shelf is for the food. I'd love to
get a pellot smoker grill combo, but money is extra t ight, and I just don't
have $800 plus to run out and buy something I don't actually need in order
to make smoked food. My issue seems to be to figure out how much charcoal I
need to maintain a certain temperature, and knowing how hot the inside of
the smoker is. This particular model I have does have a little door at the
bottom where you can load fresh charcoal, but when I've got fresh lit,
burning hot coals in my chimney starter, it's just not big enough to get it
in there easily. The only other alternative I can think of is to lift off
the top three quarters of the smoker to get to the fire to pour the coals on
and spread them out.
Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Hudson
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2020 3:55 PM
To: blindcooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blindcooks] Re: Cooking with charcoal
One of the biggest problems I have with modern grilling is this reliance on
temperature, moon phases, funky gadgets, odd mixes of wood, spinning around
on one foot while singing Mary Poppins songs, fussing with the meats over
and over again, opening and closing cook chambers, yadda yadda. I find these
youtube channels full of irrelevant garbage that doesn't help you get a good
product at all, but exists only to promote the channels and up the
viewership.
Cooking with fire is supposed to be simple. No gadgets. No three hundred
dollar thermometers. Forget about probes, secret signs, moon phases, and
anything else. Just the fire and the meat. After all, that's how we started,
as humans. I bet some por cave man found a charred carcass after a forest
fire, decided to eat it and said, wow, this is tasty. Let's see if I can
replicate this.
Now that i've got all that off my chest, let me get to your question.
It depends on what kind of smoker you have. The one i've always used is the
off set smoker. This is the one that has the firebox on one side and a cook
chamber arranged vertically, like a fridge, or horizontally, like a piano,
on the other side.
For a long lasting fire, I added a 6 quart chimney full of unlit lumps to
the firebox, then fired up another chimney full. Once the flames had calmed
down from shooting out the top of the chimney, I poured them over the unlit
charcoal in the box. I add a full chunk of hardwood to the coals, or, when I
had it, fruitwood. Do not soak it. Left the firebox lid open for five
minutes, then closed it. This let any impurities in the smoke evaporate into
the air, and not into the cook chamber. If you're using firewood, and you
don't remove the bark, you can find all sorts of gross things there. Letting
that stuff burn off and escape into the air is a good thing.
I close the vents on the firebox halfway to slow down airflow and thus let
the fire burn longer. Leave it alone for about half an hour. This gets your
cook chamber nicely hot. Then you can bring out your meat and put it on the
racks. Which, presumably, you cleand and oiled.
Do not worry over much about the temperature inside the smoker fluctuating
when you add new coals. And you can minimize this by preparing a fresh
chimney of coals fifteen minutes before you need to add them. Just follow
the same procedure. Light chimney, wait for them to burn down a bit, open
firebox lid, pour chimney on, add new wood chunk, leave firebox lid open for
five minutes, close.
Your meat is not going to care too much if your temp fluctuates between
270-320 degrees. This is cooking with fire. It happens. It's supposed to be
fun, not regimented.
Now, if you're cooking on a kettle grill, you can do sort of the same thing,
but it's going to burn much hotter due to the smaller area. Think how it
takes a small room less time to heat up than a cathedral, for example. Make
sure when you add new coals to the grill that you top off the water pan.
That pans is going to be important in keeping the temp lower.
If you're cooking with a ceramic egg, you don't need to add new coals very
often, if at all. Those things are amazing, but i've never had the
opportunity to use one, so can't really tell you much.
I hope this helps some. I haven't had the opportunity to smoke anything for
well over a year, because I got nowhere to store a smoker and firewood
anymore. Sigh.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Rawlings" <twosocks76@xxxxxxx>
To: "Blind Cooks" <blindcooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:28:09 -0800
Subject: [blindcooks] Cooking with charcoal
Before I get going, this discussion is open to anyone and everyone who wishes to read and/or participate. Unless I’m mistaken, Rob Hudson is the only list member who cooks with charcoal. I hope there are others, because I’ll take as much feedback as I can get.
Here’s my issue. I finally, after several years, decided to make a smoked pork loin for dinner last Friday. It turned out well, but the wood chunks burst into flame not long after I added them to the hot coals, despite having soaked them for several hours. I still pulled the roast in time, and it tasted great, except the sugar in the rub on the bottom of the roast caramelized just a little too much. But otherwise good. I posted in a mens’ cooking forum about my experience, and several guys told me that I probably used too much charcoal, making the fire too hot for what I was trying to do.
Yesterday, I tried again, this time with a whole turkey that I dry-brined the night before. I tried the charcoal snake method, which is supposed to give you a long, low, slow burn for a longer time, which was what I wanted. Lump charcoal is all I currently have, so I used that. This time, I think I didn’t use enough charcoal, because after nearly three hours on the smoker, the internal temperature had only gone from 45 degrees to 120 degrees. I brought it in to finish in the oven, because it was nearly dinner time, and the kids can only wait so long. The final results were wonderful, and I loved the dry cure under the skin of the bird.
So here’s my issue. I need to figure out how to get that long, slow fire that maintains a temperature, inside the smoker, of roughly 275-300 degrees, preferably using lump natural charcoal. I have found a YouTube channel called the cookout coach, and I like what I see so far. Aparrently, and I had heard this before, lump charcoal burns a little hotter, and for a shorter time, as compared with charcoal brickettes. Now, I understand that a lot of brickettes are loaded with petroleum products and lighter fluid, things I definitely do not want anywhere near my food. But aparrently, not all of them are made that way. I like that they burn a bit longer and are more uniform in size and shape. I’m currently trying to learn exactly which brands are free of the additives I don’t want so I can at least have an alternative to the lump stuff, if I decide I want to use it.Does anyone, including you, Rob, have any tips or suggestions here? I really do not want to reload the smoker with more coals part way through the cooking process, if I can help it, as that loses a lot of heat from inside the smoker, and extends the cook time.
Jon
