DaveD it's taken me a while but I never forgot I owe you this post. Hopefully this satisfies your curiosity whether you use the method or not.
I posted this under the SV topic since there's not a dedicated SVQ topic...yet.
I’ve owned my SNS kettle for almost 3 years now and really enjoy cooking over charcoal again, after a 10+ year hiatus. It’s a wonderful grill with many options for cooking low and slow or hot and fast or somewhere in-between. Thanks to contributions from Pit members like ecowper, who wrote a timely, detailed post explaining his experiences with it, many of us have gone down the SNS learning curve quite fast, yours truly, excepted. Still, I like to experiment with devices I don’t fully understand the capabilities of yet.
During my experimentation, I’ve adopted a method for short, 45 – 90-minute cooks that doesn’t require you to light a chimney of coals or putz around with the vents frequently to keep the grate at a desired temperature. It’s simply a modification of the popular 2-zone method that preserves charcoal and time so you can sit in your zero-gravity chair and drink your favorite beverage with fewer interruptions. Am I lazy? Mea culpa.
I create a 4-zone system by placing a wad of aluminum foil across the SNS insert making the insert volume half the size where I place the briquettes. In this method, I have never filled the water pan because I want the grate temp to rise slowly and steadily over the course of the cook. Sometimes I leave the empty water pan in to make the fire zone even smaller, depending on the estimated amount of charcoal I need and estimated cook time.
Below is a diagram of how I set it up. With the insert installed in the back of the kettle, Zone 1 is in the back right of the grill where I light and burn the briquettes from right to left. Zones 2, 3 and 4 are cooking zones, depending on how close to the fire - zone 1 - you wish to be. I know that the SNS is well suited to keep the temperatures fairly even under the dome, but there’s still some variation of temperatures at grate level. This method takes advantage of that variation to allow slower or faster cooks while using less charcoal, dispensing with the chimney, frequent vent adjustments and by allowing the grill to slowly rise in temp.
After the first few briquettes catch fire and glow red, I put the lid on and start monitoring the grate temp until it reaches ~185F. Next, I set the upper lid vent and lower bowl vent to ½ open and start the cook. The bottom ash-dump vent is fully closed. I rarely make more than one adjustment to the vents after the cook starts. If I want to give a protein more time to uptake a good amount of smoke, I’ll cook in Zone 3 near the rim initially. Using this method, most of my cooks end up with a final grate temp of ~350F and take between 45 minutes to 90 minutes. I will also add, I’ve only used this method as part of a SVQ cook, so my protein is already cooked to my desired final temp before it goes on the grill.
Mods, feel free to move this to the ‘Jokes’ topic if it is so lame that it warrants such treatment.
I posted this under the SV topic since there's not a dedicated SVQ topic...yet.
I’ve owned my SNS kettle for almost 3 years now and really enjoy cooking over charcoal again, after a 10+ year hiatus. It’s a wonderful grill with many options for cooking low and slow or hot and fast or somewhere in-between. Thanks to contributions from Pit members like ecowper, who wrote a timely, detailed post explaining his experiences with it, many of us have gone down the SNS learning curve quite fast, yours truly, excepted. Still, I like to experiment with devices I don’t fully understand the capabilities of yet.
During my experimentation, I’ve adopted a method for short, 45 – 90-minute cooks that doesn’t require you to light a chimney of coals or putz around with the vents frequently to keep the grate at a desired temperature. It’s simply a modification of the popular 2-zone method that preserves charcoal and time so you can sit in your zero-gravity chair and drink your favorite beverage with fewer interruptions. Am I lazy? Mea culpa.
I create a 4-zone system by placing a wad of aluminum foil across the SNS insert making the insert volume half the size where I place the briquettes. In this method, I have never filled the water pan because I want the grate temp to rise slowly and steadily over the course of the cook. Sometimes I leave the empty water pan in to make the fire zone even smaller, depending on the estimated amount of charcoal I need and estimated cook time.
Below is a diagram of how I set it up. With the insert installed in the back of the kettle, Zone 1 is in the back right of the grill where I light and burn the briquettes from right to left. Zones 2, 3 and 4 are cooking zones, depending on how close to the fire - zone 1 - you wish to be. I know that the SNS is well suited to keep the temperatures fairly even under the dome, but there’s still some variation of temperatures at grate level. This method takes advantage of that variation to allow slower or faster cooks while using less charcoal, dispensing with the chimney, frequent vent adjustments and by allowing the grill to slowly rise in temp.
After the first few briquettes catch fire and glow red, I put the lid on and start monitoring the grate temp until it reaches ~185F. Next, I set the upper lid vent and lower bowl vent to ½ open and start the cook. The bottom ash-dump vent is fully closed. I rarely make more than one adjustment to the vents after the cook starts. If I want to give a protein more time to uptake a good amount of smoke, I’ll cook in Zone 3 near the rim initially. Using this method, most of my cooks end up with a final grate temp of ~350F and take between 45 minutes to 90 minutes. I will also add, I’ve only used this method as part of a SVQ cook, so my protein is already cooked to my desired final temp before it goes on the grill.
Mods, feel free to move this to the ‘Jokes’ topic if it is so lame that it warrants such treatment.
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