Hopefully I'm not the only one who has bad days at the grill. I keep telling myself even the best pitmasters must! Plus, I'm finding a bad day at the grill is still a pretty good way to waste a day!
Saturday was one of "those days". I made some simple modifications to my grill recently in the hopes of increasing efficiency and better smoke & heat control. At first it seemed these mods were going to be great, but after the first run I'm not very impressed. Now, it may not only be the fault of the mods, but even with a firebox full of briquettes I couldn't hold temps above 200F for any significant length of time ( or so I thought!)
BBQ Chicken and smoked Mac & cheese were the order of the day, along with a pile of bacon to be used as a garnish on the Mac & cheese. Since I had trouble last time with heat and heat control, I opted to try lump charcoal instead of briquettes. I don't usually use lump, simple because briquettes burn longer and more consistently. My hope was that lump charcoal would get me up over 300F, so that I could regulate the heat better ( I was looking for a steady 250-275F ).
The lump charcoal worked fine getting me up to the high 200's and even broke 300 degrees for a short spell! Sadly though, it wouldn’t hold for long and began traveling down to the low 200’s.
Everyone knows (or quickly learns) the stock temperature gauge on most out- of- the-box grills and smokers are woefully inadequate. The gauge on my little Brinkmann doesn’t even display temperatures! It simply says something like “LOW” , “OK” and “HIGH”. I am not happy with three “settings”! I want to control the grill like a kitchen oven. To help me achieve that, I installed two thermometers at grill level; one on the left and one on the right.
After about an hour of pre-heating it appeared my mods may have worked, but shortly after I noticed my two thermometers were no longer working in tandem. The left side was climbing up over 25 degrees higher than than the right side. Now, I am not well versed in the area of thermodynamics - I don’t even know if that's the right word, but it sounds cool - so I am a bit stumped how the side farthest from the firebox would be hotter than the closer side. With no real baffles the thermometer on the right side is about a foot from the firebox. I realize heat rises, but I would think the intense heat from the firebox would at least bring the right side higher and not show an almost 40-50 degree difference in temperatures.
With constant supervision and a lot of fiddling I was able to get the temps back within about 10 degrees on both sides, but now I’m down to a steady 200-210 degrees.
I cooked the bacon at our usual 225-250 (with the help of MORE lump charcoal), but lo and behold it comes out more crispy than I planned. Of course there is not one single thing in the world wrong with crispy, but that’s not what I was going for! Could both of my thermometers be out of whack? Tomorrow I'll throw the digital probe in there and see where we're at.
So, there is fail number one! Ok, so it wasn’t really a fail, per se. It was, however, disappointing because it tasted and looked just fine, but it wasn’t really the way I had intended it (maybe I’m a little hard on myself?)
Next up, chicken. Last week, I made some BBQ chicken and got some rave reviews from family and friends and I was quite proud of how it looked and tasted. So much in fact, that I needed to try again! I put the chicken on, hoping for a roughly 2 hour smoke at around 225-240F. Finally my thermometers are back in sync- but only at 200F- and my firebox is full and rolling! I settle back in my chair and tell myself it’s ok and it’ll just take longer to cook than I planned.
One of the “rules” l learned early on was to avoid lifting the lid. I especially wanted to stick to that rule, just to keep the heat as constant as possible. Also, I did everything the same as last week (except the lump charcoal this time) so why shouldn’t I expect the same results?
I placed the meat the way I thought would be best; breasts closer to the left (away from the firebox, where the heat was higher?????) thighs in the middle and drummies on the right. About 1 hour in I decide it’s time to check the results. I open the lid and find the drummies are completely cooked and burning on the bottom. I spent the entire time glued to that smoker and the temps never went above 230 the entire time (on the left side!) - yet things were burning! GAAAH!
I saved the chicken and only had three drummies I wouldn’t include in a photo (they’ll still make a nice couple of chicken salad sandwiches), but the uneven temps and burned bottoms has me vexed! As I said during dinner, we went for taste, rather than appearance. That's my story and I’m sticking to it!
The mac & cheese turned out pretty good too. Being a casserole that needed stirring every 10 minutes or so (we wanted smoke all the way through) I didn’t worry so much about burning.
So everything came out ok. Why are you complaining Rick? Because it’s MY blog, that’s why!!
No really, it’s purely frustration that things didn’t go the way I wanted. I guess this is my way of stomping my feet and pouting.
I did learn a few things; mostly things I shouldn’t do- like avoiding opening the lid! I also learned that lump charcoal, in my limited experience, will get very expensive if today was any indication! I went through an entire bag for some chicken, bacon and mac & cheese!
Tonight I got a load of oak & maple firewood. I am hopeful that hardwood will get me higher temps, burn longer and give me better heat control. It’s a learning process, .right? We’ll see what happens.
Now, back to the drawing board and practice, practice practice!
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