Maker BBQ

Tim's Rib Rub

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ingredients

Process

Combine all ingredients

Smokehouse Bacon

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ingredients

1/2 cup Kosher Salt
4 teaspoons Curing Salt
1/2 cup Packed Dark Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Maple Syrup
10 pound Pork Belly with skin

Process

Combine the Kosher Salt, Curing Salt, Dark Brown Sugar
Add Maple Syrup and mix to combine
Place Pork Belly skin down in a large non-reactive tray and cover both sides with mixture (Note: The tray should have high walls, the belly will release water as it cures)
Refrigerate for 6 days, flipping the Pork Belly over every other day
Remove the belly from the tray, rinse clean, rinse tray clean dumping fluid
Put rack in the tray, put Pork Belly on tray, and return to refrigerator for 12-24 hours
Smoke to 150 degrees internal temperature
Remove skin with sharp knife

Start A Fire

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Many Ways, One Goal
How To Start A Fire
- With Burning Coals
- With A Chimney
How To Never Start A Fire
- With Match Light Charcoal Briquettes, Or Lighter Fluid
- With A Propane Torch

Many Ways, One Goal

There are many ways to start a fire, there are tools, gizmos, gadgets, fuel, and so much more that it could make your head spin. We are going to give you our most common techniques, but realize there are many ways, use what works best for you.

Our one goal is simple, start a fire that brings nothing undesirable to the taste of our BBQ.

How To Start A Fire

With Burning Coals

The best way to start a fire, hands down, is from another fire. Take burning coals from a fire that is already working, even if it is of another type of wood, and use that to start your new fuel.

With A Chimney

If you don’t already have a fire burning, then our next choice is to use a chimney like the Weber Chimney to start a set of charcoal briquettes. Now we prefer all wood fires in our Offset Smoker, charcoal briquettes like the Kingsford Original Charcoal Briquets are easy to light and good at lighting other fuel. So we’ll light a chimney of briquettes and pour that into the bottom of our firebox. Then we will stack logs on top of the charcoal fire, letting that burn in and get things rolling.

Now none of that explains how we start the chimney to begin with. For that we are major fans of Weber FireStarters Lighter Cubes. These amazing paraffin cubes are great at starting the chimney. You simply place one on the ground, light it with your Lighter and put the chimney over it.

How To Never Start A Fire

With Match Light Charcoal Briquettes, Or Lighter Fluid

Never, ever, ever use lighter fluid or Match Light Briquettes to start your BBQ fire. It will bring a sour, toxic taste to your food, and over time build up in your pit.

With A Propane Torch

I’ve seen people use propane torches to start charcoal, or wood, and to be honest it seems like a lot of trouble. It will produce an inconsistent fire where logs or briquettes are not evenly lit. I have no issue with fireboxes that include propane starters at the bottom which evenly light things, but don’t use a torch.

Klose Backyard Chef Temperature Ranges

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
Hypothesis
Setup

Introduction

I recently purchased, via Craigslist, a used Klose Pits Backyard Chef to serve as my new offset smoker. The Rivergrille served me well, but I got an incredible deal on the new pit, and so it was upgrade time. Now though, I need to understand the temperature ranges I can expect within the pit.

Hypothesis

Knowledge is power, nothing more. This is an observational experiment only, we’re not testing any particular hypothesis.

Setup

The Klose has a 50” main chamber, with one half depth removable shelf. In addition it has a 20”x20” vertical chamber with three shelves in it. We are setting up 7 probes in the pit.

Near Fire Main Chamber
Far Fire Main Chamber
Near Fire Shelf
Far Fire Shelf
Low Shelf Vertical Box
Mid Shelf Vertical Box
High Shelf Vertical Box

In all cases below, we will be testing at a particular temperature which will have been held for at least 5 minutes before temperatures are measured. Target temperature is measured at the “Far Fire Main Chamber” probe.

Experiment 1 - 250°F Fire, No Water Pan

Setup

Temperature of 250 degrees, no water pan.

Results

Near Fire Main Chamber - 260.7°F
Far Fire Main Chamber - 254.1°F
Near Fire Shelf - 320.8°F
Far Fire Shelf - 315.7°F
Low Shelf Vertical Box - 189.6°F
Mid Shelf Vertical Box - 200.5°F
High Shelf Vertical Box - 209.3°F

So we’re seeing about a 5-6°F difference between near and far Main Chamber, that is very stable.

The shelf is a little surprising, just the few inches of lift moves us up 60°F, but near and far shelf have the same 5-6°F difference that the rest of the main chamber has.

The vertical box is perhaps the most surprising until you think about the physics of it all. The low shelf, farthest from fire and chimney, is the coolest at 189.6°F or put another way about 60°F cooler than the “Fire Fire Main Chamber” probe it is only about 8-10 inches away from. From there, the temperatures go up as you get closer to the chimney, because heat rises, so we see the mid shelf 10°F warmer (50°F cooler than main chamber) and the top shelf at another 10°F warner (40°F cooler than main chamber).

Experiment 2 - Fire 275°F, No Water Pan

Setup

Temperature of 275 degrees, no water pan.

Results

Near Fire Main Chamber - 280.7°F
Far Fire Main Chamber - 275.2°F
Near Fire Shelf - 344.1°F
Far Fire Shelf - 336.5°F
Low Shelf Vertical Box - 200.4°F
Mid Shelf Vertical Box - 213.4°F
High Shelf Vertical Box - 224.9°F

Experiment 3 - Fire 250°F, Water Pan in Baffle

Setup

Temperature of 250 degrees, water pan with 1 gallon of water directly in the baffle.

Results

Near Fire Main Chamber - 251.4°F
Far Fire Main Chamber - 250.2°F
Near Fire Shelf - 315.1°F
Far Fire Shelf - 298.7°F
Low Shelf Vertical Box - 190.2°F
Mid Shelf Vertical Box - 200.8°F
High Shelf Vertical Box - 214.2°F

Experiment 4 - Fire 275°F, Water Pan in Baffle

Setup

Temperature of 275 degrees, water pan with 1 gallon of water directly in the baffle.

Results

Near Fire Main Chamber - 309.2°F
Far Fire Main Chamber - 272.9°F
Near Fire Shelf - 343.9°F
Far Fire Shelf - 323.3°F
Low Shelf Vertical Box - 193.8°F
Mid Shelf Vertical Box - 212.6°F
High Shelf Vertical Box - 230.5°F

Basic Cheese and Mushroom Sauce

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ingredients

1 can of Cream of Mushroom Soup
1/2 can of Heavy Cream
1/2 can of Milk
1 cup of Grated Cheddar Cheese

Process

In a sauce pan over medium heat, add the Cream of Mushroom Soup, Heavy Cream, and Milk.
Stir mixture until integrated and warm. You need this smooth (sans Mushrooms of course) so you’ll know when the chesse is melted in the next step.
Add the cheese slowly scattered throughout the soup, stirring to integrated and cover with the sauce. Stir continuously until the cheese is totally melted and the sauce is once again smooth and integrated.

Stoker Test 1

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
Hypothesis
Setup
Results
The Results
The Graph

Introduction

So I’ve had a Stoker Power Draft System for about 5 days now, used it for one cook session where I did some Rack of Lamb and Chickens, but today our goal is not to cook, it is to experiment.

Hypothesis

Given that the Stoker controls “all” of the Oxygen getting into the firebox, I should be able to load up a bunch of logs, set a temperature, and then not have to touch it for hours.

Setup

We ran this experiment starting at the wee hours of Friday April 3rd, 2015. The fire was lit just before 5:00 AM, it was built as follows:

One Weber Chimney full of Kingsford Original Charcoal Briquets
- Started using Weber FireStarters Lighter Cubes
Seven Logs of seasoned Post Oak from my log pile.

Firebox Arrangement

In the firebox, from bottom to top, we had the following:

Fire Grate, providing about 1 in of airflow underneath the stack.
The lit charcoal, piled slightly to the center
Two logs running east-west
Two logs running north south
Two logs running east-west
One log placed down the “chimney” created by the other logs.

Stoker Configuration

We are running the Stoker setup as so:

Running software version 11.0.1.11
10 cubic feet per minute blower coupled over and completely covering the air vents into the firebox.
1 pit probe, set in the middle of my cookbox, set for a desired temperature of 250°F.
Monitored using the StokerLog application
- Configured a fire alarm range of 0 degrees (I knew we were starting cold), to 290 degrees (because that would be way over temp and not good)

Weather

According to my weather application, we are running approximately 65°F outside as we start the fire with 16mph

Chimney

As will become relevant later, we started with a 100% open chimney on the smoker.

Results

Morning Prayer

The fire was lit, and I was ready to take an hour on this Good Friday to pray. I had signed up for 1 hour of prayer as part of my church doing 24 hours of prayer, so 5-6am needed to be focused on other things. And it mostly was.

The Initial Climb

We had the fire lit and started monitoring the temperature in the cookbox start at 4:54am. As you can see from the images below, we made rapid progress getting up to 250°F, reach it for the first time right around 5:13am.

Leveling Out, Or So I Thought

I was completely unaware of what the temps in the cookbox were, as I was still praying, but as it turns out, things were not going so well. At 5:21am the fan fired for one last time, but the temp did not stop rising. So at approximately 5:45am, the fire alarm I had set for 290°F went off, interrupting my prayer, and I realized that something needed to be done.

I cut back the chimney to be 50% covered and by 6:00am it had dropped back to 260°F, but seemed to be levelling there, so I covered the chimney to 75% covered. At 75% covered I quickly realized that the slope of my line was falling way to fast, so at 6:05am I restored the 50% chimney setting. The temp dropped as low as 241°F recovering from my adjustments, but made it back to 250°F by 6:11am. And now we were locked in.

Truly Leveled Out

From 6:11am onward, running a 50% covered chimney, we were completely locked in. Temperature variations were now all in the +/- 5°F range of 250°F. That is fantastic, it is the Stoker doing the job it was intended to do, so now the question is how long can it keep that up?

Ideally we’d like to see it slowly burn down all those logs to nothing but ash, while holding the temperature perfectly solid the entire time. This ignores some significant factors though. As those logs burn down, producing more and more ash, they will begin to obstruct the airflow under the fire. Eventually the ash will exceed the approximately 1 inch of lift our fire rack has, and that will in turn affect how well the fire can burn. So I would expect to see eventually that the fan will be running nearly constantly, and we’ll fall below 240°F despite this. When that happens, we will need to open the firebox and help it out. How long did it take to reach this point?

At 9:11am we finally fell below 240°F, so we opened the firebox to take a look.

As you can see in the video, in my rush to setup this morning I had some logs leaning on the edge of the opening to the cookbox, this meant that as the logs below them were consumed, the did not properly fall and get consumed themselves. So I’ve rearranged those logs and we’ll see how long we can maintain temperature again with those.

The Results

From first hit at 250°F to our first fall below 240°F, we ran a total of nearly 4 full hours (3 hours 58 minutes to be exact). If we count only the time that the Stoker was in complete control of the temperature, we still have 3 hours exactly (6:11am to 9:11am). That is a very good run of not having to worry about a smoker. You can get a lot of other things done in that time, like leveling up your Destiny characters, or playing Borderlands with your friends. Or maybe just writing up the notes from your experiment.

The Graph

Tim's Texas Rub

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ingredients

Process

Mix all ingredients in a shaker bottle with enough headroom to mix thoroughly
Spread liberally on any meat, works best with pork, chicken and other white meats.