Hi all. Newbie here. Any opinions are greatly appreciated.
I have a GMG Davy Crockett. I was having trouble with meats getting way too done, so I set up my Maverick temp probe and found that the reading just above the grates, where the probe is held, could be wildly different than my setting on the smoker, even though I was pretty careful about placing the heat shield where instructed to. I just decided to trust my Maverick going forward, and set the smoker to whatever temp was needed so my Maverick read the temp I wanted. Obviously not an ideal solution, but I'm not sold on trying to get the smoker fixed, and probably trust the Maverick more anyway.
The question is this: during setup, I'll set the smoker to 230* or whatever is needed, but once I put a 6-8 pound chunk of room temperature meat in there, the temp obviously drops quite a bit from what it was holding steady at before (part of this is surely that the "cold" meat is near the temp probe, but also just the physics of it all means the temp in such a small volume of the smoker will assuredly drop too). Should I be manipulating the smoker temp setting throughout the smoke to attempt to keep my Maverick probe reading the desired smoking temperature? This would require setting the temp quite a bit higher to start, and monitoring the probe temp and dropping the smoker setting as the meat warms up for the initial portion of the smoke. Or, should I trust that the setting I used prior to putting the meat on, which held the empty smoker temp steady, is the proper setting to use throughout the smoke, even though my Maverick probe will read quite a bit lower for a while until the meat warms up?
I have a GMG Davy Crockett. I was having trouble with meats getting way too done, so I set up my Maverick temp probe and found that the reading just above the grates, where the probe is held, could be wildly different than my setting on the smoker, even though I was pretty careful about placing the heat shield where instructed to. I just decided to trust my Maverick going forward, and set the smoker to whatever temp was needed so my Maverick read the temp I wanted. Obviously not an ideal solution, but I'm not sold on trying to get the smoker fixed, and probably trust the Maverick more anyway.
The question is this: during setup, I'll set the smoker to 230* or whatever is needed, but once I put a 6-8 pound chunk of room temperature meat in there, the temp obviously drops quite a bit from what it was holding steady at before (part of this is surely that the "cold" meat is near the temp probe, but also just the physics of it all means the temp in such a small volume of the smoker will assuredly drop too). Should I be manipulating the smoker temp setting throughout the smoke to attempt to keep my Maverick probe reading the desired smoking temperature? This would require setting the temp quite a bit higher to start, and monitoring the probe temp and dropping the smoker setting as the meat warms up for the initial portion of the smoke. Or, should I trust that the setting I used prior to putting the meat on, which held the empty smoker temp steady, is the proper setting to use throughout the smoke, even though my Maverick probe will read quite a bit lower for a while until the meat warms up?
