Great write up. I've been cooking on a kamado for several years now. One thing that I had to learn on my set up was in order to get the bark and flavor I wanted I had to cook some things hotter than I ever had before. That is especially true for brisket. The Kamados hold moisture because of the low air flow. That changes the way some things cook. My first brisket was cooked low and slow. I waited until the temp probe said 203 before I ever opened the grill. It was a wet grey and brown mess. At 300 they turn out fine.
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In my kamado, I jack the temperature to 275-280, and get some nice bark. It doesn’t seem to hurt anything. The kamado is a good,
moist cooking environment.Comment
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Thanks for the great write up. I don't have any sort of Komando, except for when it get really hot and humid out, so really, I'm just here to enjoy the ride.
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Thanks for the write up!Comment
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Thanks to you both for the excellent write ups. Very interesting.Comment
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This is a great topic. I love watching learning curves progress. About the smoke ring and smoke flavor, I find that they are enhanced by adding more wood than you would normally use--5 to 6 large chunks for longer cooks. The same thing happened on my first couple of WSCGC cooks, with/without the SnS. Adding more wood and keeping the temps above 250° solved the barkiness concerns.
You may have said, but what fuel did you use for that first kamado cook?
FWIW, I comparison, I find that my WSCGC delivers about the same smoky flavor as the PBC does, but differently in that with the PBC the smoke flavor is the first thing you taste, then the other tastes come into play as you continue to eat that bite. With the WSCGC it's the reverse, you taste more of the meat flavors first and the smokiness comes out near the end of eating the bite.
KathrynLast edited by fzxdoc; February 4, 2021, 07:06 AM.Comment
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Thanks to encouragement from David Parrish I am doing my first TURBO SLOW cook today. Got a 4 pound pastrami on the grate, SNS going with a small amount of lit lump, then filled in, and some wood chunks on top. I have no pit probe, just a meat probe, so am going old school, and relying on following SNSK recommended vent settings (1 on top AND bottom), and looking at the dome thermometer. My Smoke is off getting fixed by Thermoworks, and I've got an old Dot from the kitchen monitoring the meat.
This pic is about 9am today. Ever since, I look out from my office and a nice plume of blue smoke is rising from the top vent of the SNSK. Dome thermometer is hovering around 275, with vents both at 1.
Also, I am thinking of getting a big screwdriver and opening up the hooks on this grate. I'm used to my old Easyspin where the hinged section removes. My choices today were having it flop over on the meat, or flop over on top of the wood chunks.
I know this defies the guidance I saw in a couple of videos, to put the wood chunks on the bottom of the charcoal, but I thought I would do what I am used to from the kettle first, and see how things worked out.
Last edited by jfmorris; February 4, 2021, 11:56 AM.Comment
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carlscan26 I had some struggles with temperature control yesterday. I blame a lot of this on the fact that my Thermoworks Smoke is off for repair, and I was using a Dot to monitor the meat, but going by the dome temp. The meat took SO long to get out of the 130's into the 140's (like 3pm, it was at 137, 6 hours after hitting the grill!) that I finally went and found a grate level probe and clipped it to the cooking grate, and switched to that probe on the Dot, finding that with a dome temp of 275, my grate level temp was 210! No wonder it was going so slow! Anyway, I played with vents, stirred ash and added more lump, and eventually got things up to where the grate level temp was 250, and I pushed on through the stall to a IT of 170, about 12 hours after the cook started. At this point, I was done, and did not expect to be able to hit 203F internal temp before going to bed. So.... I decided to go a different direction for finishing out the pastrami.
I blame most of my issues on still learning a new cooker, and overly trusting the dome thermometer.
Here's what it looked like when I brought it in at 9pm.
There was a LOT of shrinkage during the cook, but I like the look of the bark. I immediately vacuum sealed it, and tossed it in the fridge overnight.
This morning, I fired up Anova at 195, and into the bath it went for 4 hours. Should be ready around 11:30. I'll pull it, cut the bag open, and let it cool down for 30 minutes on a cutting board before making my lunch today.
So much steam was coming off the pot I made a "lid" from some foil:
Last edited by jfmorris; February 5, 2021, 09:07 AM.Comment
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Might be handy to keep a piece of paper with grate-vs-dome-temps references for the main ranges. Then whenever your grate probe goes kapooey you can consult that to know what you're doing. I've done that with kettles/SnS. I have never done it with the SnSK though. -
Huskee that's a good idea. I pretty much know where the settings are over on my Performer with the SNS by heart, but this is an entirely new experience, and its acting a bit different likely because of the much larger volume inside the Kamado, and the thermal mass. And the vents are a lot different.
I am wondering if that pastrami is safe, the more I think about it. It spent a good 6 hours below 140F, hovering in the mid 130's for several of those hours.
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FWIW, if you're curious about pastrami shrinkage, you may want to check out this post , jfmorris .
Looks good. Can't comment on your food safety concern. Might be a time for BBQ roulette.
I've got 3 pastramis-in-waiting in the fridge right now, sitting out the rub phase. As I poured 42° cold water over them from the tap for the soaking phase, it gave me pause. I should have put a few ice cubes in the water for peace of mind. Sometimes I hate knowing that holding food for 4 hours or more between 40° and 140° is a food safety risk.
KathrynLast edited by fzxdoc; February 5, 2021, 10:49 AM.Comment
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On the 40 to 140 thing... Like all of this, it's not a binary risk. I think letting something sit at, say, 90F for 3.5 hours is risky. Something at 138 for 1 hour? Not that concerned. In this case, Yvonne being just off chemo might give me pause, but I just don't know how to evaluate the risk at the margins where it's not a case of "this sat at 70F for 6 hours because my SV circulator failed" which happened to me a year ago. That was easy - #tossthatoneComment
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Well, to satisfy the curious - I ate a nice pastrami sandwich for lunch, and am still alive and kicking!
The SVQ process worked out very well, and the bark held up in the bath. Pastrami was great, considering it came from a Sam's Club flat that has been in my deep freeze since last April! The vacuum seal bag had about a 1/2 cup of purge in, but no bark came off in the bag. I had to cut it to see that the grain ran prety much diagonal across the peice of brisket, so I had to switch directions after the first cut or two.
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Looks great. Glad it worked out for you. I did a side-by-side comparison of a home-corned beef vs. a storebought corned beef pastrami cook. The texture of the home-corned beef's pastrami was different--not as packed-looking as the storebought's pastrami end product, but for taste, texture and tenderness, I couldn't tell them apart.
That's when I stopped corning briskets for pastrami. It's a fun experience, but takes up much-needed refrigerator space for too long a time. Storebought corned beef is very forgiving, and, if properly soaked, yields an excellent pastrami, at least in my experience of smoking many, many pastramis for a pastrami-loving family.
KathrynComment
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jfmorris , what we don't eat in a couple of meals I slice, vacuum pack and freeze for future meals. Whenever we visit our kids, I take a couple of sliced pastramis. Always a huge hit. Pastrami slices better (thinner) when cold. I just thaw the sliced hunks in the fridge and then make rubens on the panini press, which heats the sliced meat up perfectly.
KathrynLast edited by fzxdoc; February 8, 2021, 07:32 AM. -
Coming back to these posts so that I could remember the process for pastrami, and your comment about a pastrami loving family caught my eye. My daughter turns 24 tomorrow, and guess what she wants for her birthday dinner? Pastrami! I've got a 3 pound and 4 pound flat in the spice rub in the fridge, and probably gonna smoke it this afternoon to about 170, then vacuum seal and SV it at 195 for 4 hours tomorrow like I did last time, as the results were fabulous before.
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This post and others like it have helped so much with the SNS Kamado I was fortunate enough to win here last year. The issue has been temp control but through trial and error, bolstered by the accumulated wisdom of Amazing Ribs, I’ve literally been running 262-266 indirect grate level for the last 3+ hours on a 8.5 lb Berkshire butt. Started at 7am and running a tad on the hotter side to hopefully get dinner on the table at a marginally reasonable hour. Fam is well aware dinner may wind up being pizza delivery though!
One failure was trying to do an overnight cook well before I was familiar with my first ever Kamado. Went to bed with temp steady but too low to hold so woke up to 100 grate temp and similar temp on the butt with no way of knowing how long it sat in the bacteria the danger zone. I didn’t want to risk making people puke so just in case, in the trash it went.
Thanks to all.
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IronNole so glad if I was able to help in any way.
I’ve got quite a few cooks down with my SNSK now, and most have been in kamado mode. I’ve done a lot of direct and indirect cooking in that mode and have it dialed in pretty well now. I need to put the SNS in there and learn all over again with that now I suppose.
Right now I trust a big pile of lump in the bottom of the SNSK to smoke about as long as I can envision needing to smoke anything. I also had the advantage coming into this cooker of 30+ years of smoking on offsets and kettles, as well as a wealth of knowledge of kamado users here in the pit to help me along.Comment
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