Watcha cookin'?

[irul&ublo]

Even if the internal temp gets to 200+/-, if you don't cook too long, it doesn't fall off the bone. There should be some bite. 225 steady for 4-5 hours for a St. Louis rack is pretty much perfect

[Phill]

I threw some short ribs in a water bath at 80. I have some people coming over in 12 hrs. I'll pull them out and throw them on the grill. First time trying this, hope it turns lut

[Captain Awesome]

Terribly overexposed photo of my brisket after 12-ish hours on the smoker. Will try to remember to grab a pic once it's sliced.

Right now, it's sitting in a "faux cambro" (aka in a styrofoam cooler, wrapped in towels) and awaiting the guests.

[oftpiste]

Not that it matters much but apparently fall off the bone in BBQ comps is frowned upon and it's all about the bite.

Oh, it fucking matters!

[oftpiste]

That's a motherfucker right there. Yum.

Terribly overexposed photo of my brisket after 12-ish hours on the smoker. Will try to remember to grab a pic once it's sliced.

Right now, it's sitting in a "faux cambro" (aka in a styrofoam cooler, wrapped in towels) and awaiting the guests.

[Bobby Stainless]

Good show!

Bone in Ribeyes tonight.

I am not in control of the food tomorrow. Hotdogs and Hamburgers at the outlaws. Always a win though.

[2FUNKY]

[Pegleg]

About to start my first ever overnight smoke... a smallish point end brisket (4-5 lbs) and a 9 lb pork shoulder. Planning to put the meat on around 10pm, and assuming everything goes well overnight check it around 7am.

In the meantime, here's the grilled pizza I made last night:

[Danno]

I took no pictures, but on tap for tonight was a stew of chicken thighs (boneless skinless) in tomatoes, kalamata olives, and capers, served over brown rice. Stupid easy and tasty.

I made it in the crock pot so no doubt it would taste better made in something else, but still, I'm happy in my ignorance.

[Captain Awesome]

Looks like lots of good smoked meats coming out of Maggotville this weekend.

Put a brisket in the smoker at 10:00 last night. 3 racks of ribs will get started in about an hour.

That looks like an awesome setup. What's your rig?

Here's another, less overexposed, shot of my brisket, pre-slicing:



And here's the obligatory shot of the sliced brisket. It was a hurried photo, with a phone camera, so again, not so great as photos go, but it was DELICIOUS.



We also finished off the remnants of a bottle that I was saving for a special occasion - tonight was the occasion, with good friends and good food.



All in all, a nice middle to a 3-day weekend.

[farmer]

It's a 40" masterbuilt digital electric. I have a pit boss pellet grill as well, which gets probably 75% of the work these days, but for longer smokes I find the masterbuilt keeps a more constant temperature and higher humidity.

[::: :::]

Lot of good work here...I've already eaten dinner and I'm drooling reading this thread

[oftpiste]

May I tell a story you grill-heads might enjoy? Though I suck at succinct writing I'll do my best.

A Tale of Two TECs.

20 years ago I bought a TEC Patio 2 grill. I think it was around $1500 at the time. It was a big deal to buy this. Some people love them, some not so much. I'm of the former camp. This grill has been used year-round since. It's gone through a couple sets of burners ($80x2 each time), grates ($175x2 each time), burner screens ($60x2 each time) etc. Yes, their parts are stupid expensive. No one (anymore) makes aftermarket parts.

The last year or so the old grill has needed a refurb and I've been reluctant to spend the dough on the parts because the box is getting rusty etc.

So I hop on CL the other day and search for TEC. Just for giggles. One listing, a Patio 2 shows up. $150. Looks pretty nasty, corroded, grimy in the pics. I figure even if only the grates are decent I'll grab it, marry the two grills together and be ahead of where I was before for a lot less dough.

Arrangements are made and I drive 30 minutes to the pseudo boonies. Out past where PNW Brit lives. Up a gravel driveway lined on each side with junk cars, boats, crap. At the top of the driveway is a trailer with a blue-tarp roof and massive amounts of stuff for 50 yards in each direction. A mess. I wanted to take a pic but thought better of it. I'm thinking, "this a tad sketch. Middle of nowhere, gun not in the truck, would have to back down the steep driveway"........

So I go look at the grill. It's caked in schmutz. Really gross. One grate is good, the other is shot. I light the thing and it lights, but no idea if the burners are good. Bad ones light but don't burn or heat properly after a few minutes.

I offer the guy $80 for the whole thing including a box of unknown accessories and a still certified LP tank. He doesn't like it but takes it anyway. I drag the nasty, greasy thing home on a tarp in the back with some sense of dread for the project. The accessories are in a cardboard box that also contains rotting apples.

So yesterday I tear into it. Soaked it down in "30 Second Outdoor Cleaner". This shit cleans anything. Stared wiping and scraping and hosing, more cleaner, covered the burners with saran wrap. Lather, rinse, repeat several times. It starts to look good. Better than mine. I'm getting stoked, but will it work?

Finish cleaning, hold my breath, fire up the burners and let them run a while. They're perfect. Just the way they're supposed to work, and the way mine haven't worked for a couple of years. Now it's feeling like a score instead of a chore. And there's a BNIP spare burner.

So for $80 and some elbow grease I got a perfectly working $2000+ grill, a spare burner, a rotisserie attachment, extra grate parts and some other random stuff. Here's how it came out and the Bistecca All Fiorentina I cooked on it, (made with 2" thick ribeyes that were $4.77 a pound - WTF? - at Safeway) yesterday. If you've never done this treatment to a steak you should. Simple and amazing.



It was a good day for a bargain hunter. I feel like the king of the world.

[~mikey b]

Nice

[Game Over]

Score!

[Pegleg]

Well, the first overnight smoke went pretty well. Started the fire around 8:30pm, put the meat on at 9:30 (5lb point cut brisket and 9lb pork shoulder), babysat it until the temp stabilized at 235 at about 11:30pm, and went to bed. At 2:30am the alarm went off - temp had dropped to my lower setpoint of 210. Turns out it had rained for a bit, and apparently that caused the temp to drop. I futzed with it and got it stable at 225 and went back to bed at 3:30am. It stayed pretty stable at 225 until 1pm when I pulled the meat, wrapped it in foil, and put it in a cooler to rest. Came out very tasty. The overnight method definitely made things simpler in that I wasn't rushing the cook - I didn't even use the Texas crutch (wrapping the brisket in foil at around 160 degrees) because I was fine with just waiting through the stall. But it also definitely made for a less-than-ideal night of sleep. Anyhow, some pics:

[oftpiste]

Nice work! FWIW, I picked the brain of a local BBQ joint owner about his brisket smoke/cook. It is the best brisket I've ever had (again, FWIW). He has a great way to get through the stall. I adapted it to the Traeger with success, and it probably adapts to your cooker as well. They use real wood smokers of course, but this worked great for me.

Smoke very low ("smoke" setting on Traeger which ranges from about 170-200) for 12 hours. Take it out, wrap in parchment and put it in a cooler overnight. Back on the smoker at the same temp (ish) for another 6-8 hours, then let it rest before serving.

Putting it in the cooler apparently keeps the cook going to some degree and that's what they do for the briskets they serve in his restaurant. MIt's a 2 day cook, but might save you the sleepless night effect.

[Pegleg]

Nice work! FWIW, I picked the brain of a local BBQ joint owner about his brisket smoke/cook. It is the best brisket I've ever had (again, FWIW). He has a great way to get through the stall. I adapted it to the Traeger with success, and it probably adapts to your cooker as well. They use real wood smokers of course, but this worked great for me.

Smoke very low ("smoke" setting on Traeger which ranges from about 170-200) for 12 hours. Take it out, wrap in parchment and put it in a cooler overnight. Back on the smoker at the same temp (ish) for another 6-8 hours, then let it rest before serving.

Putting it in the cooler apparently keeps the cook going to some degree and that's what they do for the briskets they serve in his restaurant. MIt's a 2 day cook, but might save you the sleepless night effect.

Hmm, I may have to try that! The results were awesome, but I don't really like the overnight smoke process - usually if I'm BBQing it means that we're having a bunch of folks over, and I'd prefer not to be super tired from not having slept much.

One slightly weird thing - the brisket's internal temp stalled out at 201 for some reason. I was shooting for 203 (which Amazing Ribs recommends), and it never got there. I waited for 2 hours at 201, then it actually went down to 199 and I just pulled it. After resting it for a couple of hours in a faux cambro, it was actually a little overcooked. Any idea what happened there?

[oftpiste]

^^ No idea! I'm a shitty chemist. One thing that intrigued me about Jack's (Jack's BBQ) advice and I'm trying to learn from is that he (and his pit guys) pays NO attention whatsoever to temps either in the meat or in the cook. He has a general idea of what the range of the cook temps are, but doesn't track it. Not a thermometer in sight.

They fire their big smokers the same way every day for all the meats (they might move pieces from a lower to higher rack at times) every day. They rely completely on touch/feel of the meat to determine when to take it off. I pushed on the temping question a little bit and he emphatically said, "I honestly don't know what the meat's temperature is. I just know how it's supposed to feel when it's done and that's when it comes off the fire". Again, as a seasoned pro he knows what the ranges should be but that's not the point.

They do of course know generally how long things take, and that's where the above technique comes from, but it ain't about 201 vs. 203. For us amateurs there's a leap of faith and some learning curve here, but it makes a helluva lot of sense to me and I like the vibe of it.

[Pegleg]

I think most of the commercial operations do it this way, but it's not really practical for the home cook who only BBQs a few times a year - you never get enough practice to really gauge by feel, since every piece of meat is different and you have to have experience with hundreds before you can accurately tell without measuring temp. Doesn't surprise me that they'd have that approach, but I don't think it's a good fit for someone like me.

It's the same as the thing about being able to tell how done a steak is by how it feels - that's great if you cook steaks for a living, but for the backyard chef cooking for friends it's a great way to seriously overcook or undercook your steaks, when using a thermometer would avoid that problem.

[Danno]

The brisket was delicious, but I was thinking it would have been better if it had been two degrees hotter.

[Cruiser]

Hell yes

[oftpiste]

Agreed for the most part, but I kinda have the steak feel down. I've also read on some BBQ sites that a thin bladed knife into the fat layer on a whole brisket will tell you a lot about doneness.

I guess my point (long-winded as usual) was that the technique I described that he gave me worked perfectly in my attempt and I didn't ever take the temp of the meat and it came out great.

I think most of the commercial operations do it this way, but it's not really practical for the home cook who only BBQs a few times a year - you never get enough practice to really gauge by feel, since every piece of meat is different and you have to have experience with hundreds before you can accurately tell without measuring temp. Doesn't surprise me that they'd have that approach, but I don't think it's a good fit for someone like me.

It's the same as the thing about being able to tell how done a steak is by how it feels - that's great if you cook steaks for a living, but for the backyard chef cooking for friends it's a great way to seriously overcook or undercook your steaks, when using a thermometer would avoid that problem.

[hatchgreenchile]

So much smoke stoke! I love it.
We did 9 lb of pork shoulder yesterday @ 250 over apple, turned out excellent.
Any recommendations for a temp probe?

[oftpiste]

I have this one. Many years and many thermometers later I can safely say this is the best yet,

https://www.amazon.com/Lavatools-PT1...in+thermometer