Dialing It In

I'm home this morning, waiting on return calls for some projects I have hanging, and I decided to give the new smoker a dry-run.  The instructions recommend a seasoning, or break-in cooking with no food, so I hooked the propane bottle up and lit the burner.  It got up to temperature quickly, so I'll spend the next hour or so tweaking the adjustments to see how the oven reacts to those changes.

You can't see it in the photo, but there are little wisps of smoke rising from the joints, which is just exactly what I want.  Low temps (225 to 250) is just perfect for smoking, and it's amazingly easy to maintain those temps with this thing.  That burner reacts quickly to changes on the heat adjustment, and this box does not work like your house oven, where you set the temp and forget it.

I probably need a better thermometer than the one that came with it.  Bimetal thermometers are notoriously inaccurate, and the first upgrade will probably be a better (digital) thermometer that I can hang on the outside of the box with a probe at the cooking grate.

Any pit, from the simplest Weber grill, to the most expensive custom unit, takes learning.  You've got to learn what your pit will do, and how it reacts to changes in inputs.  Simple things like damper settings change the way the unit cooks, and if you want good barbeque, you've got to know your pit.  After I play with it for another hour, I'll know more about it, and the interior paint will be heat-seasoned, and I can start burning meat on it.  It's been a while since I cooked a brisket, and that might be the first go-around on this thing.