Sous vide and smoke that chuck roast...

[rickgregory]

OK so I'm playing with a 2lb chuck roast. Sous viding it, then smoking. I could have smoked the whole thing but this is an experiment.

It's at 19 hours in the SV right now. So... thoughts on pulling it at 24 hours (6pm tonight) and smoking it tomorrow vs letting it go 36 hours, then smoking? I'm figuring smoke to ~150, then crutch using the juices that the SV is creating.

[Jerod Broussard]

Depends on what kind of texture (slicing vs pulling) you are shooting for, and how long you might want to smoke.

[rickgregory]

Thinking slicing. Since it's SV first, I want to smoke enough to get some flavor on it and to get a decent bark. I can smoke ~8hours tomorrow or as long as I want Monday.

Oh and the SV is set at 155F (this is basically Kenji's recipe from here https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/...ck-recipe.html)

[rickgregory]

OK, this went well. I need to try without the SV step to compare (the HARDSHIP!).

I did the sous vide for 24 hours at 155F, pulled it Saturday evening and tossed it in the fridge. This morning I grabbed it from there, warmed enough to get the juice in the SV bag to be liquid and them tossed a variant of the Big Bad Beef rub on it (no onion or mustard powder around) and put it on the Weber with the SNS running. Start off close to 300F, got some bark on it then closed the vents to ~225. Crutched it at 150 to add little moisture (I used some of the juice off the SV bag) and when it hit 170 the temp probe was sliding in easy peasy so I pulled it out of the foil and let it set the bark back up for 30 mins. The result?

Moist, sliceable (which I wanted vs pulled) and great bark. Not as much smoke taste as I anticipated - maybe the apple is too subtle for beef, I'll try pecan next time. And yeah, I tried it and... yeah, it's good.

[rickgregory]

Interesting stat (to me at least). The juices extracted from the 1.92lb chuck roast during SF was about 1/3 of a lb. The final, smoked weight was about 1.25lb (I ate a couple of slices before I thought to weigh it). So weight lost as moisture during smoking was about .4lb or about 6oz. Despite this, it's not dry at all. Yay, fat.

[T-bone]

I recently tried smoking the chuckies before SVing and I thought they had a much better smoke flavor.

https://pitmaster.amazingribs.com/fo...uckie-home-run