Learning to smoke (BBQ), lesson 1

So, I made my first attempt at smoking this weekend. there is a distinction between smoking, grilling, and barbecuing. I usually grill. Yesterday I tried smoking and barbecuing.

I bought the offset smoker so I figured now that I have all my thermometers in place it was time to try it for what it was intended. It makes a wonderful grill, lets see how it smokes.

I took a corn can (slightly large than a standard soup can) and cut the top and bottom off and cut it down the seam and made a vent extension out of it. This I put into the bottom of the exhaust vent, let it expand to fit the inner diameter of the vent, and pulled this down to grill level, forcing the smoke and hot air to travel to grill level before exhausting.

I put a drip pan to catch the meat drippings on the charcoal rack on the right hand (cold/exhaust) side of the barrel. I put another pan on the charcoal rack on the left (hot) side of the barrel with the leftover beer in it that I had been marinating the tri-tip in, which I added some water to as well. This is my water pan to evaporate and keep the chamber moist during the cooking process to prevent the meat from drying out.

I started by dumping an overly full lit chimney of charcoal into the firebox. I had the coals on the bottom rack to keep them off the bottom of the firebox so the coals can breathe. The temperature shot up to 275. This was too hot. After a while of waiting for it to die down I decided to remove most of the coals. I ended up with only a half dozen or a dozen coals.

This brought the temperature back down to about 170 so that I could add my meat (1 great big tri-tip steak - marinated for only a few hours (should have been overnight) in beer and Worcestershire and 2 small racks of beef ribs - coated in bbq sauce. I put the ribs furthest from the hot side because the meat was less thick than the tri-tip.

I checked on it every half hour. I started by adding just 2 lumps of coal, but after about an hour my temperature died down too low. After that I started adding 6 coal briquette every half hour. This maintained my temperature at just over 150 (cold side). If I wanted the temperature to climb a bit I would add 8-9 briquette instead of just 6. This would bring the temperature up another 10 degrees or so from where it was previously.

I would also add a handful or two of hickory wood chips. This time I put the chips in a pile instead of spreading them around like I usually do when grilling. I piled the chips directly on the briquette pile but on one side to try to keep them off the hot spot in the middle. This worked great, making the chips smoke but not burst into flames. I had them soaking in water for at least a half hour before adding them, and they would smoke for at least 15-20 minutes.

Every hour or so I would check on the meat. It was indeed cooking slowly, as it had a cooked skin and was coated over but did not look burnt like grilling might induce. I had a meat thermometer as well that I was using later in the process to help determine if the meat was done. Despite my doubts that a chunk of meat would take hours to reach the ambient temperature, it did in fact take many hours for the internal temperature of the meat to equalize. The chart on the meat thermometer said that medium rare was about 145 and medium was about 160. I was shooting for 150.

I put the meat on at about 2:30 Sunday afternoon and was unable to remove it before 9:30 at night. Even then the meat was slightly rare. The tri-tip only read about 135 internally, but it was time to eat.

Both meats came out very moist. The tri-tip came out very, VERY smoky flavored. Too much, in fact. The ribs came out a little too rare. I ended up having to throw the grill rack over the coals in the firebox and throw the ribs in there for a few more minutes just to get them cooked sufficiently.

LESSONS LEARNED:

1) Start earlier - this is accomplished by being prepared the night before, instead of waiting for a last minute shopping trip as I did. This includes PRE-marinating your meat.

2) Start with less coals - about a dozen coals would be a good starting place, at most a half a chimney worth, as the first load needs to bring the chamber up to temp, but it is easier to add coals and bring temp up than to correct an overly hot fire, especially with as leaky as that firebox is, it is difficult to starve the fire of oxygen in order to stifle it.

3) Less smoke - next time I will try something sweeter like apple or cherry chips and I will use a smaller handful instead of two large handfuls. I may try some chunks instead of chips next time as well, hopefully achieving a longer, slower smoking.

4) Rotate - as shown by the undercooked ribs the meat closest to the hot side does indeed cook faster, even if the temperature differential is only 10 or 20 degrees. Rotate meat half way through the process.

5) Water pans are good - my dad said that he was battling drying meat when he was smoking. This may be because he did not have a water pan and/or because he was cooking at a higher temperature.

6) Season - I did not season the meat as I would have done were I grilling. I think the meat lacked some flavor because of this. Next time I will pre season the meat, including the ribs, possibly season some more while smoking, and add bbq sauce toward the end.

7) Thermometers are awesome!

Sadly, my meat came out Sauce Worthy. No, that's not a good thing. What is sauce worthy, you ask? It means that the meat needs sauce, like A1 Steak Sauce. This is a bad thing. Anything you put A1 on becomes chewy A1. It could be dry, burnt, rare, moist, it doesn't matter. The meat simply becomes texture at that point. I personally consider Sauce Worthy meat to be a failure. I try not to get offended when others put sauce on my meat though, to each his own, but a properly grilled piece of meat tastes best in it's own right, and needs no augmentation, and frankly is not bettered by it.

The BBQ ribs only tasted like BBQ on the outside, not the meat, which I am not sure how to solve quite yet, as I don't typically BBQ. I believe that to properly BBQ, meaning, I would guess, to get the BBQ flavor INTO the meat, you must BBQ at a higher temperature than the temperature at which you smoke. These may, therefore, be mutually exclusive tasks.