- Oct 11, 2014
- 51
- 11
When I first began doing this a couple of months ago it was considerably cooler outside (where the electric smoker is) and often the wind would be blowing pretty hard. In my notes I wrote down the temp and time used to do the few things I've tried cooking/smoking so far: fillets of Swai, boneless pork loin roast, ground turkey 1lb loafs and 1/2lb patties, and a ribeye steak. This past week things have been much different than they were a couple of weeks ago. I've had the RediChek 2 probe thermometer that was so helpfully recommended by the nice people in this forum, and have been paying attention to the IT as suggested. But for example the ground turkey loaf that took 2hrs at 230° to reach 150 IT a couple weeks ago, was cooking "too" quickly a couple days ago and ended up dropping the temp to 207° for about the same or less time to get the same result. And tonight the pork loin that took 2hrs 40min at 225° to reach 135 IT a couple weeks ago, tonight took less than 2hrs to reach 140°. Is that because the outside temp is higher, or because of humidity, or what? Thinking from one direction it could seem that if the outside temp is higher the overall temp in the smoker will stay higher, but from another direction if the outside temp is lower then the electric element in the smoker will be on a higher percentage of the time so it could take less time to cook than when the outside temp is higher. What to think??? Do we need to always take the outside temp into consideration and adjust cooking times and temps accordingly, and should make note of such things for different outside temperature ranges?