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.

Using A Stick Blender Without Creating An Unholy Mess

They go by many names. Stick blender, immersion blender, motor boat and perhaps there are others. No matter what you call them, they all possess the power to create one hell of a mess. When making hot sauce, barbecue sauce or some other thing on a sauce pan on the stove top the requires the stick blender, you can cut way down on the splatter factor with aluminum foil..

1. Cut a piece of foil big enough to cover the pot.
2. Cut a slice in the foil from one of the sides to the middle.
3. Put the dormant stick blender into the middle of your sauce pan.
4. Slide the foil around the blender.
5. Fire up the stick blender and blend away.

This cuts WAAAAAY down on the splatter factor.

C'mon Baby Light My Fire

This is unashamedly lifted from Alton Brown.

To light a charcoal chimney you need the following

• Newspaper
• Vegetable Oil
• Shot Glass
• Matches
• Charcoal
• Chimney

Crumple up 3 to 4 pieces of newspaper. Whatever will fit comfortably in the bottom of the chimney. Put the chimney, newspaper side down, on a flat surface that won't ignite. You can do this in your grill, if you are grilling. I have a portable backyard firepit that works perfectly for this. Pour yourself a shot of vegetable oil. Drizzle the shot into the chimney over the newspaper. Fill the chimney with charcoal. Light the paper. Wait 10 - 20 minutes until the charcoal at the top of the chimney is starting to go white, then dump the chimney into your grill or smoker. You are now ready to get cooking.

One Reason to Keep HItting the Gym

Meijer had Kingsford Charcoal on sale. The 2x20 packs were just under 10 bucks, which comes out to less than 5 bucks for a 20 pound bag of charcoal. I came home with 160 pounds of charcoal in the car. I shouldn't need to go shopping for fuel anytime soon.

How much charcoal to use in the smoker?

This isn't something I've seen asked too many places and something I haven't given much thought to, but the last couple of cooks I have either way under or way over did the charcoal. For my smoker and the way I cook, I now will be following this rough guideline

1 chimney full of charcoal for every 3-4 hours of cooking.

This chimney goes in the smoker, before lighting anything. This is also independent of the few pieces of wood I throw in for smokey flavor.

So, for example, today I did drumsticks on the smoker and that was about a 4 hour cook, so I would have done the following.

• Throw a couple of pieces of wood in the fire basket.
• Fill the charcoal chimney with charcoal and dump that into the fire basket.
• Throw a couple of more pieces of wood on top of the charcoal
• Fill the chimney and light it. When the chimney is ready, dump it into the fire basket.
• Put the grate on and give the smoker about 15 minutes to heat up, warm up the grate
• After the 15 minutes, put the food on the grate
• Close up the smoker and leave it alone until I'm ready to pull the grate off.

This will end up in some wasted charcoal, but not too much. And given what a pain it is to get fuel into an upright drum smoker, too little turns into a great big hassle. Given my experience with my smoker over the past year, this should be a good guideline.

As a bonus, my wife picked up one of those back yard metal firepits that can hold a small fire. This ends up being a great place to get the charcoal going. It is easy to move and have near the smoker. Very handy. If you barbecue and don't have a great place to start your chimney, I recommend picking one up. You can probably find one at a garage sale (that's what we did) if you don't want to fork over 50 - 150 bucks simply for a place to start charcoal.

Not For You...

FINALLY

Smoker is finally fired up for 2014! 15 pounds of chicken wings, lightly seasoned with some BBQ rub are on. They will come off in about 4 hours.

Welcome Spring!