You can fire it up without the gauges. Just poke some paper in the holes to block em. Just run a small to medium fire and I would suggest just doing some chicken thighs until the gauges arrive. That way if you do burn up the meat it is only chicken and not a brisket. Chicken thighs work well for breaking in a pit.
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Welcome from Iowa. Nice smoker, very nice!Comment
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Welcome to The Pit! Congratulations on your new cooker!Comment
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Very nice! Quite a set up you have now! Start cooking!
What type of wood do you plan to burn?Comment
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Greetings, from MN. Cheers!Comment
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Congrats on taking the step to wood / charcoal. There are several good videos on the Lang Smokers Cooking Tips for curing your offset smoker.
Main thing is to clean your grates and wipe down any foreign material in the cooking chamber especially the lid. After cleaning grates, get a heep big um' fire in firebox going for an hour or so with high heat say 400 degrees. This will burn a lot of nasties out using lots of heat. After an hour or so, using light spray from hose pipe, spray inside of smoke chamber while hot. This gives it a steam bath for a few seconds and rinses anything left down into bottom. Don't flood it just light spray for a few seconds here and there.
After your satisfied that you have nuked all the cutting oils, grinding wheel glue and welding flux out remove grates and spray the entire inside of the cooking chamber down with oil. Use household spray bottle or spray PAM with peanut or coconut oil on the under side of lid and all over the barrel, as these are high temp oils that require much higher temps to burn than olive oil, sunflower or canola. Also spray chimney inside. Spray both sides of clean grates insert grates back into smoker, close lid and let the heat from fire seal the bare metal so the oils infiltrate the molecular structure of the steel. Let cure for a couple of hours in heat. Drink beer, wine or whiskey to make sure the process is completed.
Insert meat and temperature probes into meat and begin cooking. If in doubt, add more liquor to glass. Eat enjoy!
You will find that curing the inside makes the cook chamber much easier to clean after each BBQ. Leaving BBQ meat pieces, fat and BBQ sauce will make the next cook more bitter so keep unit clean by doing the following:
After enjoying your Q as the fire dies down get hose and lightly spray/steam cooker with wire brush an rinse into bottom with valve open over bucket. Comes clean with almost no effort rub grates with brush rinse down and your done. My cleaning of my smoker takes less than 5 minutes after each cook and I start with a clean nicely cured and not rusted smoke chamber for the next cook and since the cooker is hot you do not need soap to clean or excessive wire brush force. This concept is the exact same thing for care and feeding of your cast iron cookware. Hope this helps.
Good BBQ'ingComment
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