Been working on smoking with my grill indirectly for some time but had trouble keeping constant heat so I broke down and bought an electric Masterbuilt smoke. For my first attempt I tried a 6.78 lb pulled pork shoulder NC style. I included a graph of all of the temps... what can I say I'm an engineer and I like to be scientific about things. Blue line is temp setting, red line it temp in the box, and green line is internal meat temp. You can see a slow and steady rise in meat temp until the 150+ range. This is when I previously would have taken it off the grill or just turned the heat up and ended up with a tough piece of meat. But I held off and waited for it to climb out (sort of) and ended up with juicy moist tender meat that fell off the bone. You can see that I didn't open the door for the first 8+ hours, didn't touch it all just put in wood chips in the bottom. Then I opened it spritzed it a bit with cider vinegar and water and added the corn and some sausages (to early actually was trying time it all to finish together but over did the sausages a bit.) You can see the internal air temp drop when I opened it and then it climbed back up slowly. I was getting hungry and the wife was getting anxious so I upped the temp setting a bit after it looked like it was climbing out of the level off period. Came out just fine but a couple of the spots could have been just a bit softer, had to do over again I just would have left it at 230 and waited it out. Based on this test 1.5 lbs per hour is a bit to optimistic, I would always plan on 2 hours per pan, esp. since you can just wrap it and rest it and it will be even better. Put on some homemade NC sauce and a nice Jicama slaw that I created and it was amazingly good. Did some chicken wings too the next weekend and they came out great too.
Plan on running a temp graph on all my cooks now until I get it perfected.
Enjoy.
LouX
Plan on running a temp graph on all my cooks now until I get it perfected.
Enjoy.
LouX
