Conference turris::cooks

    We have a smoker and cook everything from chicken to ham.
    
    It is very basic to use fill up the pan with water and smoke 
    your meat for at least 3 hours.  You can cook meat as long as 
    you want within reason as long as there is water in the pan.
    If the meat looks pink that is because of the smoking.
    
    

    There is really not alot of bucks to cough up, charcoal smokers
    go for about $50 and gas smokers go for about $150 at Leachmeres
    I think they even had one for about $30.
    

    As mentioned, smoking is easy and fun.  There are various methods
    which you can use (dry smoking, wet smoking ((with wine, beer, etc)).
    Turkey and chicken come out great.  I've also done fish (salmon,
    shark) and even I can't mess it up.  Make sure you soak the wood
    for a while before placing into the grill. This helps increase the
    life of the wood.  Enjoy

    
    I need some help!!!!
    
    I have a large WEBER and want to smoke up some TURKEY (DEC type),DUCKS
    and salmon.  I am leaving fo California on the 22nd and would like
    to bring some smoked stuff for the family. 
    
    My friend is telling me that I should barrow his electric smoker
    as I will probably blow it using the weber.  I don't buy that, I
    aint that stupid.
    
    What about the outside temp.  How does the cold porch factor into
    smoking and were the hell do you find charcoal and smoking briquettes
    this time of year?

    
    
    Please help
    
    Thanks
    
    Garry
    

    1. Borrow your neighbor's smoker.
    
    2. Borrow the directions for your neighbor's smoker.
    
    3. Read and follow the directions.
    
    Smokers aren't grills; each was designed for a different purpose.
    Accept your neighbor's generosity, ask him for his help and advice,
    and give him a reward of smoked something or other.
                                                      
    					andrew

    
    Andrew, I will take your advise and his.  If I am not mistaken,
    the WEBER is tauted as a "SMOKER GRILL".  Why can't I put the water in
    the bottom/middle and coals around the edge?  That way the heat from
    the coals would not be directly under the meat.  this seems to make
    sense to me.  Am I missing something?
    
    I am going to barrow his smoker.
    
  Garry
    
    

I've used my Weber for turkeys and ducks, but it is not a smoker in the usual 
sense.  It will fully cook the food at barbeque temperatures, and impart a 
smoky flavor.  A smoker cooks the food at a much lower temperature.  As a 
result, the outside temperature makes little difference to the Weber.  I 
cook turkeys in the usual time (oven time give or take a few) on my Weber on 
New Years Eve, on the back deck, sometimes at temperatures below 0� F.  What 
makes the difference is how many times you take the cover off.  I usually bank 
the coals, put a foil Lasagna pan in the middle, and drop pieces of soaked (if 
dry, soaked overnight, if green, soaked for the morning, always in HOT water)
hickory wood (or bark from the shag bark hickory) or applewood onto the coals 
(not in the pan).

As far as charcoal is concerned, I make sure to get a few extra bags in the 
summer, and collect the smoking wood whenever I see it.

If you want to do the traditional smoking, you can get the wood chips for the 
smoker at Watson's Smokehouse on John Fitch Highway in Fitchburg.  They also 
sell smoked turkey/duck/salmon.  And, they will smoke foods you provide, if 
you can wait long enough for them to build up enough to fill their smoker.

						     
							- JP

    I got a smoker/grill for x-mas but have since lost the cooking time
    manual.  Does anyone out there have one that they could bring into work
    and type me a note on times to smoke certian meats.  I noticed that a
    previous reply said that aleast three hours is needed for meat.  Well
    I bed to differ.  I had a turkey that called for 8 hours.  The sheet
    I had broke down each meat with the minimum times.  
    
    Thanks in advance for the help,
    
    Kevin

   The best thing to do is use a meat thermometer and cook it until
   the proper temperature is registered.  Perhaps 3 hours over a 
   _very_ hot fire might be okay for some meats.  I have a charcoal
   fired smoker, and I find that it's usually between 4-5 hrs for several
   chicken breasts to ~8 hrs for a turkey.   The amount of wind, the
   outside temperature, and the temperature of your heat source all
   affect the overall cooking time.   After a few tries, you'll 
   acquire a feel for how long things need to cook. I never found the 
   manual to be especially accurate as far as cooking times are 
   concerned.  In the case of the charcoal fired smoker, some things 
   don't ever seem to reach the proper internal temperature because it's
   such a slow heat.  In those cases, I finish the goods in a 
   conventional oven to be certain they reah the proper temperature.
   Doing this has no effect on the flavor, and insures properly cooked
   meat/poultry.   You also don't want to be removing the cover from
   the smoker very often since doing so releases the pent-up heat and
   lowers the cooking temperature.  It takes a while for it to build
   up again.  

   Lv

    Well I cooked the Ribs this weekend for about 5 hours.....I removed the
    lid just twice to put on some BBQ sauce.  They came out great.  I
    figured they were cooked well enough because the meat pretty much fell
    off the bones.  Just one more quick question,  When white meats like
    chicken and pork cook, do they all come out pink????
    
    Thanks for the advice,
    
    Kevin

          The pinkish color is a characteristic of smoked foods, so
          to answer your question, yes.  Again, a meat thermometer is
          your best bet for determining when things are done.  Ribs 
          are great in the smoker and you've succeeded in whetting
          my appetite.  Hickory & Mesquite I've found are the best 
          woods for ribs imo.  

          Lv

              I have a good supply of Hickory chunks but the last two
    times I used my smoker I used strictly apple branches right from the
    tree so that they were green and smoked nicely. With people now
    prunning their trees for the year it should be easy to obtain some.
    Apple gives it a real nice flavor, I also used apple cider in the pan
    instead of beer, wine, water, ....

For a HEAVY hickory flavor, peel a strip of bark from a shag bark hickory, break
it up and use it instead of chips.  The first time I used this in my Webber, I 
had "inside out rare" pork.  The slices had 1/4 inch red borders, but were the
usual pork color in the middle.

Shag bark's are the trees with long loose strips of bark that look ready to 
fall off.  They are plentiful around my neighborhood, so I take about 1 piece per
year per tree, just to be sure I'm not doing any permanent damage. 

     
       I was in Wall-Mart this weekend ans picked up another Brinkman
    Smoker for camp for $19.88 on sale.