Cheap, reusable alternative to bisquettes for a Bradley Smoker

I've really enjoyed my Bradley Smoker over the last year and hope to use it quite a bit this summer now that it's finally warmed up outside.  As described in an earlier post, the Bradly is an electric Smoker that uses compressed wood chip pucks, called bisquettes, to produce the smoke.  Bisquettes are fairly inexpensive (about 3 for $1 from Amazon) but I've had some trouble finding them locally, especially late in the season when places like Home Depot and Menard's have cleared out their grill supplies to make room for snow blowers.  This can be a problem if I forget to plan ahead and don't have a supply on hand when I want to smoke something.  The other thing is that you're restricted to the woods that Bradley decides to make available in bisquette form.

A recent thread on The Hungry Onion about electric smokers got me to thinking about finding an alternative to bisquettes for those times that I may be out or when I want to use something different for smoke than what's available (herbs, tea, other woods etc...).  I started looking around and found these 1 ounce flat metal tins on Amazon (often sold as containers for homemade lip balms) that are close in dimensions to a bisquette (about 3/8" less in diameter and 1/16" thicker) and decided to give them a try.

Here is one of the tins next to a bisquette.  Using the reamer tool on a Swiss army knife  I punched several holes in the lids (ended up with 9 per tin).  I had been saving the left-over wood chips in the bottom of bisquette trays and put about a teaspoon of chips in each tin, closed them up and loaded them in the bisquette hopper.  The test run went really well, the control box advanced the tins down the ramp to the burner plate with zero issues.  Due to the slightly lower diameter each tin ended up spending a total of 40 minutes on the burner plate, half on and half off.  I opted not to fill the catch bowl with water as I figured that could damage the tins or make then difficult to open later for reuse.  When I did open the tins later all of the chips had burned up.  Hopefully I'll be able to fully load the tins with wood chips this weekend and see how they do in an actual cook!

Please keep in mind that the use of these tins as a bisquette alternative is an experiment, try at your own risk!

NuWave PIC2 Portable Induction Cooktop

A few days after I recommended the Rosewill induction cooktop that I've been using in the office for over three years, it started making odd clicking noising and giving me a brief "E1" message.  After a few seconds it would start heating but continued to make the clicking noises as long as it was operating.  After removing the casing to see if I could see an obvious cause I just decided it was time for a replacement.  I didn't want to spend too much money since this was going to live in my office, so after a brief search I settled on a NuWave PIC2 Induction Cooktop.

I remember seeing their infomercials on late-night TV and had heard good things about the hardware, but not so good things about buying it directly from them.  Since I have Amazon Prime I just ordered it from there for just under $60.  The PIC2 is a little less powerful than the Rosewill it's replacing, 1300 watts vs. 1500 watts.  For a little more money (about $75) there is the NuWave PIC Pro, which delivers 1800 watts of power.

Upon opening the box I was pleasantly surprised to find that the PIC2 came with a 9" Duralon ceramic coated non-stick fry pan.  I didn't really have a need for another frying pan at the house so it made the trip with the cooktop to live in my office.  The cooktop has six preset levels (Low-100°f, Med Low-175°f, Med-275°f, Med-High-375°f, High-425°f and Max/Sear-575°f) but you can use the controls to set the temperature to anything you want in 1° increments up to 575°f.  The cooktop is also programmable so you can set it to cook at one temperature for a set amount of time, them automatically lower to another temperature for holding.

So far I've only done one test run, I measured out 1 liter of cold tap water (50°f) and timed how long it took to come to a rolling boil using the Max/Sear setting.  This is pretty subjecting since results will vary greatly depending on the quality of the pan being used, and since these stay in my office I'm using the cheapest pans I could find.  It took 5 minutes and 45 seconds for the water to go from tap temperature up to a rolling boil.  This is actually a little faster than it took the Rosewill cooktop to bring 1 liter of cold tap water up to a rolling boil, but that was in a different pan.  Tomorrow will be the first time I use the new cooktop to make lunch, hopefully it'll be as good and last at least as long as the Rosewill did.