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!