I was pretty successful smoking a pork butt today, I choose pork butt due to how forgiving it is to telmp swings. Looking at my temp logs I needed all the help I could get.
I was shooting for 250, I think I need to dail in size and timing of wood on the fire. Using the advise from other on this forum was very helpful, thank you.
If you have any more tips I would love to hear them.
Briskets do good also. I cooked two one night on probably the cheapest offset available with red oak splits. 185-330+-F was in order. Graphing would have broke the graph.
The app had a running average that was not very informative, I want to say it was only for the previous 15 min. I downloaded the data and it looks like Average was 239.6, seems pretty good for my target of 250.
Alder seems to be the is the easiest and cost effective hard wood in my area so just went with it. I was taking the 16in splits from the wood guy and cutting them down to 8in or less. Also trying to split the larger ones down.
If you didn't get one, order the charcoal basket and use the charcoal minion method for the heat (much easier to lock in a temp). You can add small chucks of wood as needed to keep the smoke rolling, which won't affect the temp swing as much. I have to add wood every 45minutes to an hour or so.
TheWizardKnows I have (at least until tomorrow when it becomes sold) this exact same cooker. Despite being 1/4 in. steel and producing the best food, I never felt it had the volume to perform the way a 125/250 gallon smoker performs, which is why I eventually started using charcoal as the base heat source for consistent temp and feeding it a chunk of wood about the size of the palm of my hand every hour for the smoke. Regardless of fuel, it is/was the most labor intensive of my 6 smokers.
Thank you for this info! Did you have the Convection Plate? I do not have one and was wondering if it would be worth the $$. Like you said it is a bit small and the first 3rd of the grill seems to get pretty hot compared to over by the smoke stack.
TheWizardKnows Yes, I do have it and it helps. I found adding a water pan next to the fire box opening and pulling the charcoal basket as far away from opening to the cook chamber as possible helps as well.
I tried measuring my grill temp on my Traeger and it was surprising how much if fluctuated. With it set to 225 it dropped to 196 and climbed to 256 before letting it drop again. (I would post an image but couldn't figure out how to do that in a comment)
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