Poor Man's "Warming Cabinet" for holding meat after cooking... (at the cost of Free.99)

  • Some of the links on this forum allow SMF, at no cost to you, to earn a small commission when you click through and make a purchase. Let me know if you have any questions about this.
SmokingMeatForums.com is reader supported and as an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases.

dward51

Master of the Pit
Original poster
OTBS Member
SMF Premier Member
Nov 24, 2011
2,953
648
McDonough, GA
I've used warming cabinets and proofing cabinets to hold brisket and pork butts at 150* after cooking to be served the next day. This is the way the resturaunts do it also. Smoke them ahead of time and hold in a warmer, wrapped, until needed. The commercial models also have steam or moisture control options, but they cost thousands. When I cooked for the office, we had a commercial kitchen and I "borrowed" the one in there when we did functions. No pressure and questions of "when it the meat going to be done". It was already "done" but no one knew it except for the few of us on the cooking team.

Now that I'm retired I don't have that option. I even bought a non-working one from a school system at an auction for $75, but it was just too big and I did not have anywhere to put it so I gave it away to a friend (who is yet to do anything with it).

But I've found a hack that should work for most of us who have electric home ovens. Like most appliances, there are like 3 factories who actually make them, and the "brand" is just a label with some programing changes for different options. This hack will work for any Haier sub-brand such as GE, Monogram, Cafe', Hotpoint, etc....

My GE only goes down to 170*, but we want the 150*ish range for holding cooked food overnight. Fortunately there is a built in hack anyone can do. It's called the temperature offset. This is a calibration option so if your over is actually cooking hotter or colder than the target temp, you can adjust it to match what it should be. We can also take advantage of this to offset the oven cooler than the lowest set-point to get a "poor man's warming cabinet".

So by using a simple combination of button pushes on the control panel, I can tell my oven's brain/computer that it is really cooking 20* hotter than what the set temp is. So when my display says 170*, I've dialed the actual temp from the heating element down to 150*. Perfect for a warming cabinet.

And when done, it takes about 10 seconds to change it back. The GE models can be modded to +/- 35 degrees from what the display says. The Haier/GE lines have 3 different control panels but the concept is the same. All 3 models have video's on YouTube that show just how easy this is to do.

 
Last edited:
My hack is a large cooler (like an Igloo/Yeti ice chest cooler). I'll prep it by boiling some water and pouring it in first to heat up, like you would a thermos. After I dump out the water, I line it with some beach towels to insulate and then put the wrapped meat inside. It'll stay warm for hours.
 
SmokingMeatForums.com is reader supported and as an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases.
SmokingMeatForums.com is reader supported and as an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases.

Latest posts

Clicky