Loading…
1
A stubborn temp spike cost me 9 hours at a cookout in Tulsa and the fix was one dollar
Two summers ago I was doing a brisket for my brother's birthday in Tulsa and my smoker would not hold steady at 250 no matter what I did. I messed with the vents, added charcoal, dumped a whole chimney of lit coals in there, and the temp kept climbing to 300 then crashing back down. I checked the thermometer twice, swapped probes, cleaned out the ash, even moved the whole rig out of the wind thinking that was it. After about 9 hours of fighting it and one burnt flat, my neighbor wandered over, looked at my fire basket, and asked when I cleaned the intake holes. Turns out ash had packed into three of them so tight you could not see daylight through, and a piece of wire I keep in my toolbox cleared them out in maybe 30 seconds. I felt like a total idiot because I had been chasing every fancy fix except the most basic one. So do you all pull your fire basket and check the intakes on a schedule, or only when something acts up like I did?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
jackson.sarah6d ago
My last cook I spent twenty minutes swearing at the vents and fussing with the chimney, then my wife walked out, poked a screwdriver through the intake, and gave me that look like I'd forgotten how to tie my shoes. Ash had caked up in there so bad it looked like concrete. So yeah, now I scrape the basket and check those holes before every single cook, even a quick batch of wings, because a dollar worth of wire beats nine hours of standing around scratching my head. Funny how the dumb simple stuff is always the last thing we check.
4