It's Here!: Camp Chef PG24 DLX Pellet Grill.

Right now on out patio we have a huge Front Avenue (by Charbroil) propane gas grill that hasn't been used in years, a really old built in Ducane natural gas grill that's small and underpowered, my Bradley Smoker and my Weber Kettle Grill.  Since it's just the two of us now I haven't needed to use the big Front Avenue Grill for years, opting instead to use the charcoal grill.  I've enjoyed my smoker over the last few years but began looking in to pellet grills after seeing them on TV and reading about them.  The more I looked in to it the more it seemed like I could replace the grills and smoker with one piece of equipment and give us a less cluttered patio.  When Woot.com had a Camp Chef PG24DLX pellet Grill up for a good price I pulled the trigger and ordered.

A pellet grill uses wood pellets as fuel, these pellets are loaded in to a hopper and moved via an auger to a fire pot within the grill.  A computer controls the rate the pellets are moved to the fire pot based on a temperature probe within the cook chamber allowing the pellet grill to maintain a fairly stable temperature throughout a cook with minimal effort.

After a few false delivery attempts (carrier says they attempted to deliver but 1, I was at home both times and 2, video doorbell did not record anyone trying to deliver) the box finally arrived late Tuesday.  The box was in pretty rough shape so I opened it up and didn't see any obvious damage.  It was too late to start assembly by that time so I had to wait until after work the next day.  When I started unpacking all of the parts I found a couple of pieces that were bent, the flange on the smokestack was bent back in several places and the side shelf mounting tabs were severely bent.  I went ahead and started the assembly anyway.  Assembly isn't too difficult, the main body of the pellet grill comes preassembles so all you have to do is attach the legs, some handles, the smoke stack and the side shelf.  Took about an hour or so for me to assemble everything by myself.  I was able to get the smoke stack put on, but the warping in the flange left a few gaps that will probably leak smoke and let water in to the cook chamber if it rains when the grill is uncovered.  The side shelf, on the other hand, was a lost cause.  Neither of the damaged parts makes the

grill unusable, assuming the weather forecast is accurate and we won't have any rain tonight I plan on taking the pellet grill outside and doing the initial firing to burn off any oil residue on the parts and to cure the paint.  The process is to set the grill to 350°f and let it run for 30 minutes at temp.  Once I had finished the assembly I could do I got on to Camp Chef's website and submitted warrantee claims for both the damaged parts, to my surprise I got a response in less than 20 minutes letting me know that they would be shipping out replacement parts asap.  That's pretty outstanding customer service if you ask me, they heard about a problem and rook immediate steps to correct it for the customer.  They also sent me a code for 10% off my next purchase through their website, which I may take advantage of as I'm seriously thinking of adding a sear box to my pellet grill.  Unfortunately I'm currently restricted to soft foods (for the next week at least) so I'll have wait on smoking some ribs, but there may be some smoked salmon in my immediate future!

Brisket flat smoked in the Bradley Original Smoker

Since I bought my Bradley Original Smoker last year I've wanted to take a stab at brisket, but there was no way I could possibly justify buying a whole brisket when it is just two of us doing the eating.  The solution came when a nearby grocery store put brisket flats on sale.  The smallest one I could find was a 3.5 pound untrimmed flat, which was more than enough for me to play with.

It was a dark and stormy day when I originally planned on smoking the brisket, and since rain and electric smokers aren't the best of buddies I had to throw the meat in the freezer and wait for my chance.  That day came the next weekend, when it was dry out but much cooler.

I started out early in the morning, around 5:30 am.  First thing was to set up the smoker and get it warming up.  I had recently bought a resin horizontal shed for my Weber grill and smoker to live in, it works great and keeps everything dry but the tradeoff was that in arranging things so everything looked nice and tidy I made the outlet I usually use for the smoker inaccessible.  No big deal, there's another outlet a few meters away.  Unfortunately that outlet was dead so I had to run an extension cord to the other end of the patio.  Now that the smoker had power I put a foil tray of water in the bottom to catch the fat rendering off the brisket and went to the kitchen to prep the meat.

I made a rub consisting of roughly equal parts kosher salt and ground black pepper, about a tablespoon and a half.  To this was added 1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic, cayenne pepper and celery salt.  I didn't really need to trim any of the fat cap off, so I just cut a cross hatch to help the fat render away during cooking.  The rub was sprinkled evenly over all surfaced of the brisket.  I temperature probe was inserted in to the meat from the side until it was roughly in the center.

At 6:15 am we were ready to go.  Once everything was in place the temperature probe wire was threaded up through the smoke vents and attached to the thermometer.  The second wire seen that can be seen in the photo is the thermocouple attached to my PID controller.  I had the controller set to 250°f, but the tray of water I put in to catch falling grease really made it difficult for the smoker to reach temp.  The highest temperature the chamber could reach while the water tray was in place was about 220°f.  The alarm on the meat thermometer was set to 165°f and I went about my day, every few hours I would go out to check on things, add more bisquettes (I was using the Jim Beam smoking bisquettes for the most part) and make sure everything was working properly.  With the tray of water keeping the temperature down it took almost 10 hours for the brisket to reach the target temp of 165°f.  Now it was time to wrap.

I wrapped the brisket flat in parchment paper (for some reason you can't find plain butcher paper anymore, then wrapped everything up in aluminum foil.  Since there was no longer a danger of melting fat dripping down and starting a fire I removed the tray of water at this time as well and emptied the bowl of used bisquettes.  With the extra water out of the picture the smoker quickly reached the controller set point of 250°f and things moved quickly from there.  In less than 2 hours the brisket flat had made it to the final temperature of 195°f, was removed from the smoker and put in a beer cooler to rest.  195°f as the final temperature was pulled from a recipe online, I had seen anywhere from a low of 195°f up to a high of 204°f and decided to go low thinking that carryover would take the temperature up at least a few degrees.  I was wrong, because this was such a small piece of beef compared to a while brisket there wasn't much if any carryover.  To bring it up a few more degrees I ended up putting the wrapped brisket in a 200°f oven while I went down to the patio and got everything broken down and stowed away in the shed.

 Here's the final product, nice bark on the top but a little too salty.  Next time I'll have to go lighter on the rub.  The meat was moist and delicious, not quite as fall-apart tender as I would have liked but very good.  Next time I'll take it to a higher temperature, possibly 200° or  even a few degrees higher.

This turned out good, but I think I can make it great next time with a few minor tweaks.  I prepared the leftovers for freezing by vacuum sealing them and putting them in a 150°f water bath for a few hours with my WiFi Nomiku maintaining the temperature.  The packs were then chilled overnight before being thrown in the freezer.  It'll be much easier reheating brisket from the freezer this winter than freezing my butt off trying smoke another one during a Chicago winter!

The Polyscience Smoking Gun

Last week I bought a new toy on Ebay that I've coveted for a while, a Polyscience Smoking Gun.  The Smoking Gun allows you add smoke to foods without adding any heat, so you can "smoke" delicate things that you don't want to cook like fruits and cheeses.  Obviously this isn't smoking in a traditional sense as there is no cooking and no penetration of the smoke in to the food, it just settles on the surface.  Two small cans of sawdust come with the Smoking Gun, hickory and apple wood, there are several other varieties available from Polyscience but they seem a bit expensive so I ordered this from Amazon which looks to be the correct grind for the gun.  Once I've had a chance to try them out I'll add the results to this post.  Other smoke sources people seem to be using are tobacco, tea and dried herbs, so many things to burn and so little time!  For my first foray in to cold smoking I used some hickory sawdust to smoke strawberries and sharp cheddar cheese...