I'm a retired professor of electrical engineering, specializing in optics, lasers, and fiber optics. As an experimentalist I pretty much have to tinker with any piece of equipment I have. Our main home is in central Houston (anybody know a good local butcher?), but we have a second place, a condo on the ocean, in Maui. We spend about 40% of our time there. It's a tiny place, and all I have to work with is the property's gas grills; their conditions vary, and I can't really modify them permanently, so it's a challenge. But being 20 feet from the beach has its rewards.
I do all the cooking in our house, including bread making. I've always fiddled with grilling, but never with much knowledge until reading this site. My equipment is modest: I've had various small grills, currently a square Aussie charcoal grill that I modified by putting in a raised grate for the charcoal to get it near the cooking grid. I haven't tried to set it up for 2-zone cooking, and probably won't. Based on this site, I bought a Pit Barrel Cooker, and I'm enjoying learning to use it; of course, I have modified it already. I'll post details later. I'm working on a Warp-15 searing setup. On its first run, after a few minutes, my IR heat gun went off range to "High". So I think it's working, but I need better instrumentation to avoid melting the GrillGrates (the supporting PBC grate was glowing bright red). Stay tuned.
As an engineer, I'm big on measuring and recording, and I have an assortment of temperature probes from ThermoWorks and the ET-723 remote system. Pretty much the same in Maui, so I can monitor the grill from my unit. I finally managed to set up a 2-zone system on the Maui gas grill, but the "hot" side is not really that hot for searing. I may need to get some GrillGrates over there. The other problem in Maui is that the grill gas is only on from 9 to 9, so I sometimes have to finish a big pork shoulder inside (or bribe the resident manager with pulled pork). My learning curve is slow, because with only 2 of us, it takes a long time to finish up big pieces of meat. As a Texan, I need to do some brisket, but haven't yet. Maybe Jerod, the PBC Brisket King, can drive over and help out.
That is probably more than anyone wants to know. Thanks for reading. Doc Hazard, aka Jim.
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