Is there any way to get a MB 800/900 to smoke at lower temps?
My MB 900 will reliably control down to 225F, below that the temps keep bouncing around as the fan turns on an off. I'd like to be able to get down to 180F or lower if possible to do longer smokes without overcooking.
If not cooking outdoors, I am cooking on the stovetop with my 14" carbon steel wok, 12" CI skillet, or in the oven with my two Lodge CI pizza pans, or two dutch ovens. I've also got a nifty Lodge carbon steel grill pan that rocks for veggies outdoors.
Why are you afraid of overcooking at 225F? That is about the lowest temperature Meathead recommends for smoking, due to the risk of keeping food in the "danger zone" of food safety for too long. Pretty sure I read that somewhere. Anyway, at 225F, it takes a LONG time for a big hunk of meat to cook... that is why I tend to run at 250F or even 275F more often these days.
I have run my 1050 as low as 150° for a couple of hours to hold some ribs. If you just need to create more smoke, one thing you could try is skip the wood chunks in the charcoal chute. Chunks in the ash bucket work much better, in my experience. Better yet if you can let it run at your set temp for at least 15 minutes before putting the meat on, to give the chunks a little time to start burning. You can help that along by tapping the charcoal grate with a spatula or whatever to get some embers on the wood chunks.
I'll give it a try running at 180F and see what happens. The wood in the ash pit creates a lot of smoke from my limited experience but my impression is that the smoke from wood in the chutes tastes better, it doesn't seem bitter. I'm still playing with this thing though.
I tried running it at 180F set temp and it kind of works but the temp bounces around a lot between 165F and 195F. The low side I don't mind so much, but the high side will overcook things like salmon I'm hot smoking.
However, by leaving the charcoal side slide fully opening and closing the fan side slide down to about 1 1/2 inch it really helped the stability and I could set the temp down reliably to 170F, maybe lower too but 170F is fine for me. Now the temp varies down to around 162F or so and I didn't see it go over 173F in over 4 hours of hot smoking. Good enough.
I think what's going on is that partially blocking the fan allows the controller to run for longer periods since it doesn't have as much effect as when the slide is all the way open. That makes everything work much slower so the controller has a better chance to deal with the temp swings without as much overshoot.
Four hour smoked all beef kielbasa worked really well. Great smoky taste but not at all bitter. As they say: "Thin blue smoke".
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