Turning a cast-iron grill into a smoker

Question

I have a Char-broil gas cast iron grill. This is one of the style where the flame is under cast iron pans filled with lava rocks rather than cooking the food directly. Works great for when you don't want to bother with charcoal. But I digress.

My question is: I think this type of grill would make an excellent smoker, and has anyone tried doing so before?

• were you able to keep it at the right temperature? How?
• how much wood chips did you use? Did you soak them?
• did you try to seal it to keep the smoke in? again, how?

Asked by FuzzyChef

Answer

You can use a gas grill for smoking and indirect cooking. Run the burner on one side of the grill, and place the food on the other. Wrap wood chips in foil, poke a few holes in it, and place the foil pack over the active burner. You can soak the chips if you like. I've never seen much point in that, myself. The water evaporates rather quickly, and you're back with dry chips. Better to limit the oxygen supply to the wood so it will smolder, and place the smoke pack somewhere so that it does not have too much heat applied to it.

It absolutely does matter what kind of wood you use. Avoid soft and sap-laden woods like pine. Stick with hardwoods or fruit woods. Hickory is often paired with pork. Apple and cherry are used ubiquitously. Oak is strong, but imparts an interesting flavor. Mesquite can be too powerful for some people -- I personally use it for grilling, but never for smoking.

Finally, be aware that you are going to have some limitations with your gas grill. It neither holds nor convects heat in the same manner that purpose-built smokers and some charcoal grills do. You are more likely to have hot and cold spots on your grill, so you will need to examine what you are cooking each hour and adjust accordingly if necessary. You will also not get nearly as much smoke to your food, so you will also have to adjust how much wood you use accordingly (though many people make the mistake of too much smoke in their barbecue, so a gas grill's limitation in this regard can be a benefit).

Answered by Sean Hart

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Is it OK to marinate chicken and pork together?

Question

I just want to minimize dishes taken to a BBQ--marinating pork chops in a lemon/herb/olive-oil baste along with some chicken skewers. Is there anything to worry about with trichonosis when preparing pork in same dish with other meats at room temperature? I can't imagine it's a problem, but you never know...

Answer

Don't worry about the pork contaminating the chicken, but rather vice versa. A good rule of thumb with chicken is to treat it as a biohazardius contaminant. Because it is. Salmonella is present IN chicken meat, unlike other meats where you will only find microbes on the surface. Your marinade doesn't seem particularly inhospitable to pathogen growth, so cross contamination would be a nontrivial concern. OK, if you overcook your pork chops as some insist on doing, it shouldn't be much of a concern. However, may as well be safe and split the marinade between two ziploc bags. It's a small effort to mitigate risk.

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What kind of wood puts the most flavor in the meat?

Question

I want to smoke a few boston butts, but I want to know what wood has the strongest flavor, and I will be smoking them for 12+ hours, very slow and low cook.

Answer

I would go with Hickory, always taste strong and the best for me.

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Should I prick sausages during cooking?

Question

Whenever I go to a BBQ and sausages are cooking, the chef will always prick the sausages while they are cooking. I have no idea what this does, I assume it's to get the fat out, however I recently read that you should never prick sausages as it results in them being dry inside?

So my question is, should I prick sausages with a fork or knife during cooking?

Answer

I'd say no never prick the sausages if you can help it. the fat inside helps to keep them succulent and moist, and if you have a problem with the splitting and are pricking them to release the pressure as was stated by @foodrules, then I'd say you are cooking them over too high a heat. Lower the heat, or if you are BBQing move them further from the source, then you will get to have unsplit, moist sausages. When pan frying I prefer a very low heat for a long time. This allows a delicious sticky crust to develop on the outside of the sausages. mmm...

If they were meant to be pricked why would they not come pre pricked?

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Is dry rub necessary in making bbq ribs?

Question

Normally when I make bbq ribs in the oven at home, I have to prepare the ribs approximately a day ahead. I usually cover the ribs with a dry rub mixture (made of garlic powder, paprika, sugar, salt, pepper, etc.), wrap it up in foil and let it sit in the fridge for about a day, lather it in bbq sauce and stick it in the oven. While this method produces quite delicious ribs, it does require a lot of effort and planning. My questions are: Is a dry rub really necessary in making bbq ribs? Is there an alternative to this dry rub? Will the ribs taste the same if I just lather them in bbq sauce and cook then straight away?

Answer

Your ribs will have a lot less flavor if you do not use a dry rub. However you can minimize some of the time (and only a bit of the flavor) by putting on the rub, wrapping in foil, and immediately putting them in the oven or on the grill. The process of putting your rub together probably takes only about 5 minutes - it's the fridge time that takes a while.

Sitting in the fridge allows some of the flavors to permeate, and if you used a more permeable material could allow your ribs to air out a bit. These are good things, but for my rib recipe I don't put the ribs in the fridge and they still taste great. I also don't put the barbecue sauce on until about the last 20 minutes of oven time, when the foil comes off and the sauce goes on. Until then the ribs stay in the foil.

I looked up North Carolina (which uses a sauce that isn't tomato based in the eastern part of the state), South Carolina (a mustard sauce), Texas, Memphis (which uses no sauce), Kansas City (tomato based-sauce that is rather sweet) - all of them used a dry rub even with wide variations on the sauce and for both beef and pork ribs.

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How to grill potatoes?

Question

I'm having a barbecue and I'm cooking steaks and asparagus. I still have some uncooked potatoes left in the pantry. Is it possible to grill a potato?

Answer

Yes, of course you can! There are a lot of different ways to grill potatoes, so you have a lot of options depending on your taste, the types of potatoes you have and how long you want to spent preparing them. This site has some good recipes about how to grill potatoes.

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Ways to bar-b-que and smoke Kangaroo

Question

Kangaroo is an unusual meat for most of the world. From reputation, it's quite hard to cook right as it tends to dry out:

Kangaroo meat is very low in fat, usually less than 2%. This is lower than most other red meats. This makes Kangaroo very healthy but also means it must be cooked carefully. Kangaroo is also very high in protein and iron. Fat contains a lot of moisture, hence meats like beef which is very high in fat can be cooked to very well done. However because kangaroo has virtually no fat it can easily dry out during cooking. Because of this it's important to follow a few simple steps to retain the moisture in the meat.

In light of this, what smoking and BBQ techniques are appropriate for kangaroo?

Answer

I have neither cooked nor eaten kangaroo, but I think the information that it is very lean should be sufficient to answer this question. Smoking is a low and slow technique that is used to make tough cuts of meat tender. This works by using a low temperature to break down the tough connective tissues which makes the end result both tender and moist. This would not work with a lean cut of meat like a filet. You'd just end up with a tough piece of meat. So unless you really go after the toughest bits of the 'roo, I'd advise against smoking.

As ESultanik says in a comment, to attack the lean parts of the animal, treat it like any other piece of non-fatty meat (filet / tenderloin for example). Use a very hot grill and shoot for an internal temperature of rare to medium-rare depending on preference. The exact technique for cooking is up to you. I tend to do a two level fire for searing and then finishing, but the exact method depends on the type of grill, thickness of the cut, etc. If you would like some smoke flavor, you can throw some wood chips on while cooking like this and see what you get. The short time and frequency with which you tend the meat / open the grill may make this completely ineffective, but it's worth trying to see if you get some smoke flavor, if that's what you really want.

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Is there a way to adjust hot spots in a horizontal smoker setup?

Question

I have a combo gas/charcoal grill:

I have an offset firebox that attaches to the right side that I use to convert the charcoal grill to an offset horizontal smoker.

However, when using the offset to smoke, I have noticed that there is about a 10 degree differential between the right side of the grill, and the center. This is problematic with larger cuts of meat (boston butt, rib racks, etc.), and even with large trays (such as smoked almonds), as the side on the right cooks significantly faster.

Aside from rotating the food regularly, is there anything I can do to reduce the temperature differential created by the hot spot?

Answer

Basically, what you need to do is create a baffle that distributes the smoke further into the main chamber.

Checkout the mod #3 in this PDF for a CharGriller Smokin' Pro modification.

http://www.deejayssmokepit.net/Downloads_files/CharGrilleMods.pdf

You can do this same thing with tin foil if you're on the low budget plan.

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How do I make sure that the meat cooks well and yet stays juicy on a bbq?

Question

I am a bbq rookie and learning to cook various kinds of meat on the grill. I usually cook chicken, lamb, pork, beef and fish. However, I am struggling to get any of the meats I cook to be well-cooked yet juicy. What are the factors that influence juiciness of meat on a bbq? What are the noobie gotchas when it comes to this?

Answer

Common noob mistakes:

Cooking things too long. Meat dries out when it's cooked to too high an internal temperature. That's the whole thing, and it's true no matter how you cook something. If you like your meat to be completely devoid of pink inside, it will be dry. No avoiding it. Find out what's a good temperature for the doneness you desire, and use an instant-read thermometer to find out when you get there. You will also find that some cuts of meat want more cooking than others. A skirt steak wants hardly any cooking because it dries out easily. A New York strip, with good fat marbling, can withstand more cooking because it has that nice fat to keep things moist.

Cooking with too much heat or too little. When the heat's too high, you burn the outside before the middle can get to the temperature you want. If it's too low, you never really get a good sear on the outside, and miss out on much of the grilled food experience. And you'll need to learn to tailor your heat to the needs of what you're cooking--fish typically needs less than chicken, which needs less than beef or lamb.

Putting the meat on too early. You need to wait for the charcoal to ash over and stop flaming. If you don't wait for the coals to get right, you run a much greater risk of flare-ups and scorched food, not to mention off flavors from unburned wood or fillers in your charcoal. This is a non-issue with gas grills.

Not preheating the grate. You need to put the grill grate over the coals as soon as you can so it preheats well. If your grate isn't preheated, you won't get grill marks, and your meat is more likely to stick. You need to do this if you have a gas grill too--maybe more so, since they typically don't get as hot.

I'd recommend that you find a basic book about grilling. Any of Steven Raichlen's books will give you the general tips on how to do things. I'm not wild about his overuse of rubs and sauces--I think they're totally unnecessary most of the time--but he does know his way around a fire and a grill grate.

However, if you want your meat well-done, be prepared to eat a lot of dry (and likely tough) meat. Your only option at that point is to switch to low-and-slow techniques that cook things like pork shoulder for a really long time at a low temperature (traditional barbecue). The meat gets fully cooked, but because it has a lot of fat and connective tissue to render, retains a moist mouthfeel. But this isn't grilling, per se, and takes many hours.

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