Any one involved. Not picky.
I have enjoyed reading this thread and your efforts to tweak this are appreciated. What I would like to know is has the smoke profile on the meat been enhanced considerably by use of this accessory?
When I have gotten it to work, if you put my feet to the fire, no pun intended, I'd have to say that it enhanced it, but not "considerably".
However the whole "stick burner" thing, and it being able to consistently mimic stick burner flavor, no, it does not do that for me as I evaluate it closely.
The idea is to make the wood smolder and the smoke from the smoldering wood is supposed to give flavor to the food.
The instructions have you fire your grill up to a high heat, get the wood lit, then drop your temp down, and let the wood smolder.
However, and I mentioned this earlier, take a look at a smoldering log sometimes.
What you'll see, is white smoke. Or dirty smoke.
A well run stick burner, with a well managed fire, the wood tends to be at a point which is closer to what Aaron Franklin refers to as
"complete combustion"on page 92 of his book;
Franklin Barbecue, A Meat Smoking Manifesto.
Though this "complete combustion" is actually never reached in a pit, the goal is to get as close to it as possible. The closer one gets to it, the cleaner the smoke is.
This concept is also broached on the Amazing Ribs site in their articles on wood.
He goes on to say, and I believe him, some of the worst smoke comes from smoldering wood. Or wood which is farther away from complete combustion. So you really don't want the bulk of your smoke to come from smoldering wood.
"Some of the nastiest smoke comes from wood that's smoldering-burning without flame."
So effectively, the little bit of extra smoke that I was getting from the smoldering wood in the SDHD, is actually to large degree "dirty smoke". Look at the smoke in my post #71. It's not thin blue smoke, but closer to white. Which is why you have a difficult time seeing through it. It's not awful IMO, I've seen worse. But it's certainly not great either.
But many of us, myself included, have become so familiar with at least some degree of dirty smoke on our barbecue, in part from cooking with charcoal, that it didn't faze me.
Basically what I was getting was clean smoke from the pellets, with a touch, a tad of dirty smoke from the SDHD.
This tended to make it taste more like barbecue which I had grown familiar with since I got rid of my own stick burner and started using WSMs, Kettles, Kamados.
The results with the SDHD with small amounts of smoldering wood in it, tasted a bit closer to BBQ done over Kingsford or Royal Oak with wood chips, chunks, or logs mixed in. Not a lot closer, mind you, you could still tell that it was done on a pellet smoker. But in my pellet smoker, when I could get the SDHD to smoke, I could taste a difference between using it and not using it. I now know that this was due to the short exposure of my food to the dirty smoke coming from the smoldering wood in the SDHD.
But bottom line, this device in my opinion, is simply not worth my effort to use it because of the adverse affects it has on my temperature control.
I'm also not up for wrapping logs in foil every time I want to use it vs using one of my smoke tubes.
In short, it's simply not worth my time vs using a smoke tube, a MoJo Brick, or as the gentleman above mentions, pellets on top of the diffuser.
Which BTW, also release "dirty" white smoke, but because pellet smoke is light to begin with, the white smoke from pellets is not noxious to me, nor does it leave the acrid aftertaste that white smoke from a smoldering log or wood chunks leaves.
If you ever smell the white smoke from a smoldering smoke tube, or smoke tray filled with pellets, you'll notice that it actually smells good.
However smell white smoke from a smoldering mesquite or hickory log, and it won't smell nearly as good and you likely won't be able to tolerate it for long, and it will leave an acrid aftertaste if you should eat food exposed to it for a long time.
Sorry for the length, but I'm trying to paint you as vivid a picture as I can and give you the best description of what I have observed thus far using it.