Taking It To The Next Level

Once again Parade Day was on us, and I had a lot of food to cook. I had almost 30 people at the house, plus had to do some cooking for the people parking cars at the church. And I was, as always, hoping to send people home with leftovers, because that's what I do :-)

So I had 3 pork shoulders, 3 racks of ribs (those were graciously provided by a guest) and 15 pounds of drumsticks. The 3 pork shoulders alone take up almost an entire 22 1/2 grill grate. I needed another level for the other food, and I wanted to add it quickly, with a minimal amount of work. How to go about this?

1. Another 22 1/2 inch grate
2. 3 S-hooks
3. A dome lid from a 22 1/2 inch kettle grill

Hang the 3 S-hooks approximately equidistant from each other around the lip of the smoker. Put the grate on the hooks. Put the food on the grates. Put the lid over the food.

The lid doesn't fit quite snugly, but it does the job assuming you aren't dealing with high winds that might blow the lid off. In the future I'll drill holes in the side of the smoker to feed the S hooks into, but in the meantime this is a great way to very quickly rig up a 2nd level of grates in an upright drum smoker, should you have the need.

The ribs and chicken drumsticks normally don't take as long as pork shoulder, but they would be that much further from the heat. So I put the ribs and drumsticks on earlier than I would normally, but not at the same time as the pork shoulder. The ribs and chicken were in the smoker for about 4 1/2 hours instead of the usual 3 - 3 1/2 I would do them for. Everything turned out great. Especially the drumsticks. People that aren't normally drumstick fans were devouring them 3 at a time, or so it seemed.