Loopie gets a Smoker!

and that pork butt … looks good. make sure to rest the meat. wrap in foil, a few towels ( use old ones .. the smokey meat smell stays in them) and toss it in a cooler for an hour or 3. it holds the meat hot, lets the juices return. give it a quick shred, toss in a vinegary sauce and you are done.

Ya, resting is key component for sure…been doing that for yrs with grilled(high and dry) meat.
I let my^ first smoker roast rest for 1hr and I did read about the towel/cooler technique. Especially when you need to 'hold' it for the actual serving time.

Great tip mrduke!

Try alder for chicken. Try lower temp for pork (175).

I have some apple wood for the chicken (I also wanna try it on pork of course). This first pork smoke was mostly hickory. I'll grab Alder if I see it.
I read a thread on a BBQ forum that had talk of 190 internal temps perhaps just being the start of when to start pulling pork…with 200-205 perhaps being even more tender…as apparently it pulled apart even easier…dunno, I just read that one time at Band Camp.

need to buy house with yard to set up research kitchen / brewhouse / bike and ski workshop condo living sux….

Good work smoking team!

for pulled pork i tend to go up to 200. 195 - 200. wrap it and hold it in the cooler for at least 1 hour. i've overnighted it in the cooler ( very short night, as i pulled it off the smoker at 2 am ) and it was still piping hot when i pulled it in the morning. The key is maintaining at least 40C (140 F) for safe food holding temps.

next up for you is sauces. so easy to make, way tastier than anything you'll find in a store. for pork, my personal fave is one of the carolina style mustard sauces.

for more smoking resources there is a forum http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/

lots of info there. and practice makes perfect. and good quality lump charcoal. i use some briquettes when i have them, but lump charcoal is so much nicer. i use real wood too. my neighbour fell an oak tree .. i snagged that. apple tree pruning season … cherry wood….ask around. people have fruit trees. I hate paying 5 bucks for a bag of chips ( especially alder )

Oh yeah^…jumpin' right into the deep end Man!
From scratch today…brine, dry rub and a sauce that is so good, I will NEVER buy bottled store crap again. Ever.
Sauce isn't a big thing here at our house. I've dabbled with scratch made dry rubs casually for yrs, and we like to eat it just so… but this sauce is straight legit!

Brine and rub exact to the recipe in the chicken link previously posted…I tweaked the sauce recipe a bit based on some random comments by the author.

Brine 3hrs
Hardwood briquettes, Apple chips added every 15-20min
~275
Pulled at internal temp 172 (sauce added 10min prior to removal)
Rest under foil 20min

Everything awesome except the skin didn't crisp up. Gonna try a higher heat technique next run.

You just made me really hungry with that chicken.

Alder is everywhere; used by Native Americans for smoking salmon (something else you might look into; brine of salt and brown sugar is pretty good).

You buy your chicken from Costco?

LilyDale blows. Chicken is from Colonial Farms outta Armstrong…available at Safeway here. Very noticeably better than LilyDale at Costco.

Scopin' some BBQ forums…I see this.
MUST try this soon!!!

My parents did up a turkey on the BBQ rotisserie this summer. Used a homemade dry rub which was legit and got the skin crispy.

Don't be afraid to whip up some chutneys

BTW…(and I'll add this to the first post)…ANY and ALL BBQ related posts are welcome. Make this the NSMB BBQ thread…lets rock it out!

Good looking thread here Loopie.

We have a big green egg. It kicks all kinds of ass.

I dont do much of the cooking on it, never been much of the cooking type,but maybe i'll get more involved and we can have a little recipe party here.

What size tacklebox? If you were to do it again, would you stick with the same choice?

What size tacklebox? If you were to do it again, would you stick with the same choice?

the big one….24 inch?

Id actually prolly go smaller next time. hard to say.Although im not the cook, I am incharge of operating and supervising the egg,as well as Q/C on the beer supply.It seems that you get too much of a coal going in the big egg, more than you need and you end up wasting a lot of fuel and or throttling it to much to control the heat.

I plan on building a stone oven/smoker in the spring, so this is moot any ways,but the egg is worth every penny.

Ok, I think that is the xl. I am thinking about the large, which is around 18"