First cook on the Camp Chef PG24 DLX Pellet Grill

This past weekend was the first day since being cleared to eat regular food again (due to dental surgery) and with no rain forecasted so I took the opportunity to finally use my new Camp Chef PG24 DLX Pellet grill.

A few days earlier I had stopped by the local grocery store and found whole pork shoulder butts on sale so I grabbed one of those and a salmon fillet for the non-carnivores in the house.  The rub was made with whatever I could find in the cupboard, mainly kosher salt, coarse ground black pepper and paprika with brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, ginger powder, chipotle powder and cayenne pepper.  Very early in the morning I debagged the pork shoulder, patted it dry and coated it with yellow mustard, then liberally encrusted it with my rub mixture.  I let that sit while I set up the smoker.  After adding what I thought were enough pellets I set the dial to "Hi Smoke" and turned on the power, once the smoke started and I knew the pellets were lit and could close the lid to wait for everything to reach temp (Hi Smoke is ~ 220°f).  At around 5:30 am the pork butt was loaded on to one of my old Bradley Smoker racks for easy transport and placed in the pellet grill, the temperature probe that came with the pellet grill was plugged in and inserted to about center mass of the pork.  By pressing a button on the controller to have it display the probe temperature instead of the chamber temp it was easy to keep an eye on things from inside the house.  I let it go on the Hi Smoke setting for about 3 hours spritzing occasionally with a mixture of apple juice and apple cider vinegar before turning the temp up to about 250°f.

About this time I added the salmon fillet seasoned with a little of the rub and topped with thinly sliced lemon, I didn't want the skin sitting directly on the rack so it was placed on a piece of parchment paper before being loaded in the smoker.  I was looking for an internal temp of about 135°f.  When the salmon was done the internal temperature of the pork but was around 160°f so it was time to wrap, it was placed atop pieces of aluminum foil with some extra rub, butter and honey added before wrapping it up tightly, returning it to the smoker and reinserting the temperature probe.  Now it was just time to wait until the internal temp came up to 205°-210°f.  At one point the flame went out because I hadn't added enough pellets to the hopper at the beginning, but this was caught quickly and I was able to get things started before things had a chance to cool down.  Total cook time was 11-12 hours.

After letting the pork butt rest for ~ 20 minutes it was removed from the foil and pulled, the accumulated juices from the foil were added to some store bought BBQ sauce and reduced down a bit before being mixed in with the pork.  Pulled pork sandwiches were served with hot pickles and mustard slaw, I also made a huge mess because I thought making hush puppies would be a good idea.  The salmon also turned out excellent.

Some observations about the cook:  The Camp Chef produces thin, blue smoke for the most part which from my understanding is what you want to see and is probably more appealing to my neighbors than the acrid white smoke my electric smoker produced.  The pork butt had a distinct smoke ring, but the smoke flavor was less pronounced than what I got from the electric smoker I had been using for the past several years (which was a little too harsh in my opinion).  I may look in to getting a Pellet Smoker Tube for future cooks which is supposed to help increase the smokiness, but first I'll probably just try not wrapping the meat for the last half of the cook.  Adding some hickory pellets will also result in more smoke flavor than just using the cherry I had for this cook.  So far I'm enjoying this pellet grill, not sure what I'm going to do next but seeing as how it can be used as an outdoor wood burning oven I'm thinking I'll throw on a stone and see how my standard pizza recipe works out on the new grill.

Sous Vide Smoked Pork Shoulder

I haven't used my New Bradley Original Smoker much this year at all, since I was going to be stuck in the neighborhood all weekend due to a festival at the nearby Buddhist temple I decided it would be a good opportunity to get my smoke on.  I decided to make some pulled pork, but rather than just do the whole thing in the smoker I wanted to try something different.

There have been posts about people using sous vide in combination with smoking to good effect with beef, so I decided to try it with pork shoulder.  On my way home from work I stopped by the grocery store and picked up a boneless pork shoulder roast, I usually go for bone in but this was on sale so I gave it a try.  Since this was a spur-of-the-moment thing I didn't have a rub ready so I just raided the spice cabinet and quickly put one together.

 The rub consisted of cajun seasoning, celery salt, paprika, black pepper and kosher salt.  Rub was liberally applied to all surfaces of the pork shoulder before it was placed in a vacuum bag and sealed with the Food Saver vacuum sealer.  I put about 8 quarts of water in a 12 quart Cambro container, attached my WiFi Nomiku immersion circulator and set the temp to 155°f.  The pork shoulder soaked at that temperature for around 24 hours before being removed from the bath, allowed to rest at room temperature for around 30 minutes and finally chilled and put in the refrigerator until I was ready to start smoking.

Using the PID controller I set the smoker temperature to 250°f and loaded it up with Jim Beam flavored bisquettes.  While waiting for the smoker to reach temp I removed the pork shoulder from the bag, removed all the gelatinized juices (purge) and patted the shoulder dry with paper towels.  The purge was reduced and mixed with a commercial mustard based barbecue sauce.  Once the pork was placed in the smoker a temperature probe was put in place and the shoulder smoked until the internal temperature again reached 155°f.  Once the internal temperature target was reached the pork shoulder was removed from the smoker, tented with foil and allowed to rest until the temp went down to 140°f, at which point it was shredded into pulled pork.

 The sous vide/smoked pulled pork turned out delicious, very moist but with a slightly different texture than a pork shoulder cooked entirely in the smoker.  I believe this is due to the lower temperature that the meat was subjected to, when smoking a pork shoulder in the traditional way you want the internal temperature to get up to around 202°f whereas the shoulder I cooked here never got above 160°f even with carry over.  One thing I will do differently next time is to trim most of the fat off the pork shoulder before cooking, the lower temperature didn't let the fat render off and become crispy.  To serve I dressed the pork with some of the mustard barbeque sauce, pickles and a little sriracha sauce.  It was delicious!

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!

Homemade digital temperature controller for New Original Bradley Smoker

I've been having fun using my Bradley smoker but the control on the model requires a lot of fiddling with to achieve and maintain the desired temperature.  To make things easier I decided to add a digital temperature controller to my setup, but to make things harder I decided to make one myself instead of purchasing a pre-made unit.  Pictured to the right is what I came up with.  It consists of a Mypin TD4 PID controller with 25A SSR and heatsink, a K-type thermocouple probe, a IEC320 C14 main power switch with 10 amp fuse all housed in a styrene plastic project box .

Power is output through a standard 15 amp duplex outlet.  These come standard with both plug sockets connected so you only need to wire up one set of terminal connectors to power both outlets.  For this application I wanted one outlet to be regular uninterrupted AC power while the other would be run through the solid state relay (SSR) to control the heating element.  To make each outlet independent you just need to use a set of clipper to cut out the copper tab that connects the two terminals on both sides.

Once I had all the parts it was time to get started.  The first obstacle was to cut openings in the styrene project box for the PID controller, power connector/switch and outlets.  My first attempt didn't work out too well, I tried to use a rotary tool with a cut-off disk attached to cut out an opening.  This resulted in big globs of very hot plastic landing on my hand and the cut-off wheel shattering.  I then used a zip saw attachment for the rotary tool, but wasn't really able to control it very well and ended up with a hole that was too large for any of the components (if anyone asks I'll claim that the odd hole on the bottom is there for ventilation).  What finally ended up working for me is using the cut-off wheel to cut a slit on each side of the cutout and then using a jab saw with a metal cutting blade to finish the cuts to make the openings.  The outlets and PID controller were mounted right on the open edge of the box to save a few cuts. Holes were drilled for the mounting screws for the SSR heat sink, switch and outlets and a hole was drilled towards the top large enough to thread the thermocouple leads through. Now came the wiring.  Three wires come from the power switch, black (hot), white (neutral) and green (ground).  The ground wire was connected to the green terminal on the outlet.  Wire nuts were used to connect three leads to both the black and white wires coming from the switch.  One set (black and white) was connected to the PID controller to power the instrument.  The other two neutral (white) wires were connected to the silver terminals on the outlet.  One of the two remaining hot (black) leads was connected directly to the top gold terminal of the outlet, the final black lead was connected to the bottom gold terminal after passing through the SSR.  Finally, the control signal wires (in this case I used thinner black and white wires because that's what I had) from the PID control were connected to the DC side of the SSR.  The polarity of these connections matters so you need to be sure to connect (-) to (-) and (+) to (+).  The thermocouple was threaded through the drilled hole connected to the PID controller (again, polarity matters) and everything was mounted to the styrene case with nuts and bolts.  Finally, the top of the case was screwed in to place.

This project took a lot longer to complete since it was the first time I had attempted something of this nature.  I have not been able to try out the control box on the smoker, but I did plug a lamp in to the SSR outlet and verified that it does what it's supposed to do, when the thermocouple probe was immersed in hot water the PID started turning the lamp on and off and finally keeping it off once the measured temperature exceeded the set-point.

I spent a lot of time trying to plan out this project to end up with something that would not only work for the original purpose, but also be able to be used for other things.  Besides being used on the smoker I could see using it for home brewing to control the temperature of the mash.  I could also switch the PID controller to cooling mode, plug in a small refrigerator and use it for lagering beer.  Plug a submersible heater in the bottom outlet and a circulating pump in the top outlet and you'd have a decent sous vide setup.  The other benefit of building a stand-alone controller is that I didn't need to make any modifications at all to the smoker itself, which will be handy if I ever decide to sell it for an upgrade.

It's here!: Bradley Original Smoker Edition.

For years I've had a charcoal "bullet" smoker, and while it can produce some great meals it has a lot of drawbacks.  The main thing is that it's difficult to maintain temperature, doing so requires constant attention and fiddling which can be a challenge for long cooks.  As a result, after an initial flurry of smoking things I really haven't used it much over the past several years.  Lately I've been seeing a lot of barbecue programs on TV and have become re-interested so I started looking for a new smoker that would be easier to use and require less attention.  I looked at several types of smokers, fueled by charcoal, propane and electric.  In the end, a warehouse deal from Amazon sealed the deal and I ordered a Bradley (new) Original Smoker.  The Bradley is an electric smoker that uses sawdust pucks called "bisquettes" for the smoke.  The bisquettes are loaded in to a hopper and are fed one-by-one on to a heating element in the smoker chamber to produce smoke at a rate of one every 20 minutes.

Here is a video of the unboxing.

One thing that I didn't know until the day after ordering was that the smoker itself does not come with any of the required bisquettes, so I ordered a variety pack which was set to be delivered the day after the smoker itself.  I had intended on smoking a whole chicken, had it prepped, rubbed and ready to go.  Unfortunately the bisquettes didn't come until late in the evening so I had to go ahead and just roast the chicken in the oven rather than let it sit overnight with the rub.  Still wanting to make sue of the smoker I went out the next morning and picked up some baby back ribs.

Preparation was simple, I pulled the membrane off the bottom of the rack of ribs and liberally applied a rub (salt, pepper, sugar, paprika, cayenne pepper, celery salt, lemon pepper) then allowed it to sit for a few hours in the refrigerator.  While the ribs rested I set up the smoker, turned it on and put in 5 bisquettes for the seasoning process.    That involved about an hour of smoke at temperature to drive off any manufacturing residues and get the smoker ready for business.

The night before I had run all the removable pans, grates and bowls through the dishwasher.  Assembly of the smoker is pretty easy, the drip pan goes on the bottom and a water filled metal bowl is put in place.  The water-filled bowl is there to catch the still smoldering bisquettes as they are pushed off the heating element by the next one, this keeps ashes from flying up on tot he food.  Above that is a heat deflector followed by up to four metal racks.  The smoke generator slides in the side and attaches to a couple of metal pins, there is a power cord running to the smoke generator box and another running from that box to the smoking chamber for the main heating element.  Controls are simple, just a power switch and a dial that allows you to set the temperature from low to high.  There is also a button to advance the bisquettes.  Once you get the smoker loaded and closed you'll have to baby the temperature a bit by adjusting the dial and top vent, but once you get it where you want it seems to be pretty stable.  I put the ribs in and adjusted the temperature to about 225 degrees f.  For smoke I used a mix of apple and mesquite bisquettes for the first few hours, then again for the last 20 minutes or so.  All told the ribs were in the smoker for about 6 hours.

The ribs turned out pretty darn good, and since the smoker was running anyway I put the chicken I had roasted the night before in as well for a little smoke flavor.  All in all I'm pretty happy with the Bradley smoker.  I feel that I'll be able to do things with it that weren't possible with the old bullet smoker, like leaving it running unattended while I'm away at work or asleep for long cooks.  In order to improve the temperature stability I'm looking at wiring up a PID controller with a thermocouple and solid state relay to let me dial in a desired temperature and not have to worry about overshooting it when I'm not around.  Those parts should be here tomorrow.  I'm thinking of picking up a bone-in pork shoulder roast for this weekend to make some barbecue pulled pork.  Other things I want to try out before the end of summer is short ribs and eventually brisket.  That was something I was afraid to even try with the bullet smoker, but now may be a possibility!