My name is S 854 and I’m a smokaholic...

[S 854]

At least I aspire to become one... Julie and I treated ourselves to a Camp Chef this Christmas... put it together yesterday and did the “break-in” (about an hour @350...)...

Today I attempted my first ham... a Costco spiral slice... wanted to start out on something “easy” so as not to undercook and give us ptomaine poisoning... and a good thing i did...

According to most things I read I should have been able to second-smoke this ham in 2-3 hours @ 225 degrees and get the internal temp of the ham to around 140... WRONG!!! 3 1/2 hours later it’s barely reading 90 degrees... and Julie’s getting hangry...

My method may have been faulty... whereas I should have used an aluminum pan to set the ham in, I used an old “cookie sheet”... simply because I didn’t have an aluminum pan... and the old cookie sheet wasn’t large enough to use as an oil drain pan in the garage... so there it sat... begging to be (mis)used in my new smoker...

My 20-20 hindsight thinks the cookie sheet was deflecting the generated heat right towards and past the temp sensor causing the grill to not quite reach the target temperature... I didn’t do any measurements but I reckon there was about 2-3” of open grate on the front and back and maybe 3-4” on either side... the rest was covered by the cookie sheet...

What smoke flavor the ham did pick up was pretty darn good... so I remain optimistic for future smoke ventures... however I’m now wondering if’n the cookie sheet was my downfall or if maybe I was doing something (many things?) else wrong...

Any ideas or suggestions?

 

[bregent]

Welcome. Once you get the hang of it, I'm sure you'll love the CC. It's a good cooker. Depending on how big the ham was (they can run over 10lbs) , reaching only 90 in the center after 3 hours doesn't seem too far off if you're running at only 225F. The cookie sheet might have influenced it somewhat, but you don't need much clearance - it's a convection cooker and the fan generates plenty of airflow.
Obviously, try the next cook without to see if you run into any issues.

What smoke flavor the ham did pick up was pretty darn good

If it's the ham from Costco that I'm thinking of, it's already smoked fairly strong, so not sure if you would notice additional smoke from the grill.

Get yourself a good remote thermometer so you can measure the grate temperature for some reassurance. Have fun with it.

 

[Prairie_Smoke]

In past fully cooked hams that i have re-smoked, it's worked out well just putting them directly on the grate. You will lose probably the bottom two slices but it's not much!