UPDATE: Sorry I glopped my replies to you all together, creating yet more marathon posts; just figured out I could reply to each post separately. Thanks for your patience as I get the hang of things.
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Not tech-savvy enough to be a "lurker" on this board, I just joined — and I’m not even sure this post will land in the "introduce yourself" forum/topic. God forbid that I hijack an important topic like burnt ends. That would be a hell of an unwelcome introduction. So ... fingers crossed.
Anyway, hello to all, with greetings from a relatively new BBQ’er.
Cooking was never in my wheel house, but brisket has always been on my mind. I could steam green beans, scramble eggs, make spaghetti, and cook some pretty tasty ribeyes and prime rib, and that was about the long and short of it. But after taking a 6-week cooking class, the cooking bug bit me and I dove right in. Now I can make french baguettes, Neopolitan pizza (and my own sauce and dough) killer creamed corn, escargot, sticky spicy Asian chicken wings, crab claws w/garlic bread, and even macarons. Yes, you heard that right: macarons (not to be confused with your grandmother’s macaroons). But they are one hell of a challenge and I haven’t made them in a while. But brisket seemed even more daunting.
Enter ... my BARBECUE craze. Sure, I could make a decent rack of ribs on a propane grill, using indirect heat, but they weren’t mind blowing; and I’d never even heard of wrapping! But brisket? Brisket was the ultimate challenge. Nothing but nothing beats a good brisket. I was determined to master it and master it CONSISTENTLY. Still, worried that my brisket-smoking obsession could be short-lived, I dipped my toe into the water with an older Traeger "Lil Tex" floor model that was majorly on sale (I think that was the model name?) from Home Depot, after researching how pellet grills work, watching hundreds of YouTube videos, and going to a Meat Church cooking class done exclusively on Traegers. Matt Pittman’s brisket totally hooked me. I’m telling you, it will make you cry. Even the flat will bring tears to your eyes. It’s that good. (As an aside, f you can take one of his Meat Church classes, by all means take it. If nothing else, you will be deliciously well-fed throughout the 3-hour class — so much so, you might not fit back into your car when it’s time to leave. And if you can’t take his class, try his Meat Church rubs at the very least.)
Anyway ... my brisket/smoking BBQ adventure is now an obsession and I am all-in, which brings me to the main reason I am here. I loved my little Traeger. All of my briskets came out wonderfully (except for my first try). But every four hours, the grill would throw a fit and a fire would start in the fire box. I would have to take the meat off, unplug it, cool down the grill, take it apart, shop-vac it, reassemble, etc. before I could fire it up again (or plug it in, I should say) and continue the cook. Yes, extremely inconvenient — but everything I cooked on it was so delicious, I was willing to put up with its temperature tantrums. Finally, though, I’d had enough when it pitched a fit during a long brisket cook at 2:30am on a very cold Thanksgiving morning. Reluctantly, I took the poor thing back to Home Depot and bought a RecTec 700 Bull. And that, after hours of research on other grills; Traeger had spooked me. I assumed the transition to the Bull would be smooth. It’s just more cooking real estate, right?
Well, yes, but the transition has hardly been smooth. I’ve done four cooks on the Bull and it is just not yielding the same flavor or tenderness. Hoping and praying the problems are w/me and not the grill, and that by joining Pitmaster, maybe some of you here can give me some pointers or help me figure out what I’m doing wrong. Sure, I could return it — "satisfaction guaranteed" — but shipping 300+ pounds of Bull back to Georgia is no mean feat. (After giving it a lot of thought, I think my old Traeger just had an auger-speed feeding problem; I wish I’d just tinkered with it some before returning it. It was apparently a well-known defect — though you’ll see its fire-box malfunctions are commonly, and mostly erroneously, attributed to user error by YouTubers — and Traeger has since corrected the problem on their new models, I’m told. In fact my old model isn’t even made any more.)
In any event, the Bull is well-constructed, it gets rave reviews and, best I can tell, it works the same way as every other pellet grill I’ve ever looked at, so I’ll be damned if I know why I’m getting mediocre results. Maybe I should switch to Traeger pellets instead of using the pellets supplied by RecTec. I don’t know. RT customer service is certainly fine, though whenever I talk to one of their folks on the phone (they are all, to a person, remarkably mellow), I do wonder if Georgia has legalized something my state hasn’t. All I know is that my Traeger briskets turned my husband and guests into slavering, ravenous, grunting cavemen. My brisket on the Bull, on the other hand, leaves people politely unenthused, using forks to eat it while they’re glued to the tube — even they’re only watching an Alabama/TN type blow-out game. When my sister first saw me slicing a Traeger brisket, she thought the beautiful, mammoth smoke ring was raw meat! But after her first bite, even she went total caveman. I want my cavemen eaters back.
So that’s my long-winded introduction. Hello. Glad to be here, and nice to meet you. I really, really need some help w/my RecTec. I’ll stop at this point, since I don’t even know if this will post, much less post correctly on the "Introduce Yourself" forum. And a thousand apologies to all if I mistakenly crash the burnt-enders’ confab.
___________________
Not tech-savvy enough to be a "lurker" on this board, I just joined — and I’m not even sure this post will land in the "introduce yourself" forum/topic. God forbid that I hijack an important topic like burnt ends. That would be a hell of an unwelcome introduction. So ... fingers crossed.
Anyway, hello to all, with greetings from a relatively new BBQ’er.
Cooking was never in my wheel house, but brisket has always been on my mind. I could steam green beans, scramble eggs, make spaghetti, and cook some pretty tasty ribeyes and prime rib, and that was about the long and short of it. But after taking a 6-week cooking class, the cooking bug bit me and I dove right in. Now I can make french baguettes, Neopolitan pizza (and my own sauce and dough) killer creamed corn, escargot, sticky spicy Asian chicken wings, crab claws w/garlic bread, and even macarons. Yes, you heard that right: macarons (not to be confused with your grandmother’s macaroons). But they are one hell of a challenge and I haven’t made them in a while. But brisket seemed even more daunting.
Enter ... my BARBECUE craze. Sure, I could make a decent rack of ribs on a propane grill, using indirect heat, but they weren’t mind blowing; and I’d never even heard of wrapping! But brisket? Brisket was the ultimate challenge. Nothing but nothing beats a good brisket. I was determined to master it and master it CONSISTENTLY. Still, worried that my brisket-smoking obsession could be short-lived, I dipped my toe into the water with an older Traeger "Lil Tex" floor model that was majorly on sale (I think that was the model name?) from Home Depot, after researching how pellet grills work, watching hundreds of YouTube videos, and going to a Meat Church cooking class done exclusively on Traegers. Matt Pittman’s brisket totally hooked me. I’m telling you, it will make you cry. Even the flat will bring tears to your eyes. It’s that good. (As an aside, f you can take one of his Meat Church classes, by all means take it. If nothing else, you will be deliciously well-fed throughout the 3-hour class — so much so, you might not fit back into your car when it’s time to leave. And if you can’t take his class, try his Meat Church rubs at the very least.)
Anyway ... my brisket/smoking BBQ adventure is now an obsession and I am all-in, which brings me to the main reason I am here. I loved my little Traeger. All of my briskets came out wonderfully (except for my first try). But every four hours, the grill would throw a fit and a fire would start in the fire box. I would have to take the meat off, unplug it, cool down the grill, take it apart, shop-vac it, reassemble, etc. before I could fire it up again (or plug it in, I should say) and continue the cook. Yes, extremely inconvenient — but everything I cooked on it was so delicious, I was willing to put up with its temperature tantrums. Finally, though, I’d had enough when it pitched a fit during a long brisket cook at 2:30am on a very cold Thanksgiving morning. Reluctantly, I took the poor thing back to Home Depot and bought a RecTec 700 Bull. And that, after hours of research on other grills; Traeger had spooked me. I assumed the transition to the Bull would be smooth. It’s just more cooking real estate, right?
Well, yes, but the transition has hardly been smooth. I’ve done four cooks on the Bull and it is just not yielding the same flavor or tenderness. Hoping and praying the problems are w/me and not the grill, and that by joining Pitmaster, maybe some of you here can give me some pointers or help me figure out what I’m doing wrong. Sure, I could return it — "satisfaction guaranteed" — but shipping 300+ pounds of Bull back to Georgia is no mean feat. (After giving it a lot of thought, I think my old Traeger just had an auger-speed feeding problem; I wish I’d just tinkered with it some before returning it. It was apparently a well-known defect — though you’ll see its fire-box malfunctions are commonly, and mostly erroneously, attributed to user error by YouTubers — and Traeger has since corrected the problem on their new models, I’m told. In fact my old model isn’t even made any more.)
In any event, the Bull is well-constructed, it gets rave reviews and, best I can tell, it works the same way as every other pellet grill I’ve ever looked at, so I’ll be damned if I know why I’m getting mediocre results. Maybe I should switch to Traeger pellets instead of using the pellets supplied by RecTec. I don’t know. RT customer service is certainly fine, though whenever I talk to one of their folks on the phone (they are all, to a person, remarkably mellow), I do wonder if Georgia has legalized something my state hasn’t. All I know is that my Traeger briskets turned my husband and guests into slavering, ravenous, grunting cavemen. My brisket on the Bull, on the other hand, leaves people politely unenthused, using forks to eat it while they’re glued to the tube — even they’re only watching an Alabama/TN type blow-out game. When my sister first saw me slicing a Traeger brisket, she thought the beautiful, mammoth smoke ring was raw meat! But after her first bite, even she went total caveman. I want my cavemen eaters back.
So that’s my long-winded introduction. Hello. Glad to be here, and nice to meet you. I really, really need some help w/my RecTec. I’ll stop at this point, since I don’t even know if this will post, much less post correctly on the "Introduce Yourself" forum. And a thousand apologies to all if I mistakenly crash the burnt-enders’ confab.
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