A Weekend of Learning
The first thing I learned, I do not like Kingsford at all in the UDS!
Go purely lump with wood chunks/chips or don't bother, at least for me and my family.
The second lesson was, having mulitiple layers of different sizes of ingredients, especially salt, is not going to happen again. I want to taste the food, not multiple layers of salt. :tsk:
The third lesson, as noted by Big T above, grass feed beef is difficult to get tender. It is too lean to do without injecting it and even then I have my doubts.
The fourth lesson is that my UDS does need to have the 2" riser coming out of the center bung port as well as the nipples with end caps/valves on the air inlets. The wind was playing some havoc on the air flow and I could occasionally see several puffs of smoke being pushed out of the air inlets.
Let me describe the two rounds of smoking for you.
On Saturday I spent the day picking up trees and planting them that afternoon. Before we started planting them I got a couple whole chickens ready, the UDS going and put them on with several chunks of pecan wood. Once I got the chickens on and the temps dialed in at 300 F the UDS held temp great with few fluctations. I had picked up a 40 lb bag of Frontier Lump at Sam's club and had some Kingsford as well at the house. I filled the basket with the lump and several wood chunks. I started the kingsford in another container and dumped it into the basket. All was going good but the kingsford smell never went away at any point during the cook, blech! At least we could pull the skin off and just eat the meat. Other than the aroma the birds turned out very nice, the skin was crispy and the meat was tender and juicy. One bird was coated with Mrs. Dash original and the other with, dang it I foget at the moment..:doh:
On Sunday I figured I would try the small brisket that I had so I started getting the rub mixed up (no sugar) and applied, wrapped it with plastic wrap and let it sit. In the mean time I pulled the basket out of the UDS, dumped it on a tarp and dug every piece of Kingsford I could find out of the pile. The basket was refilled with the lump and pecan chunks. The lump was ignighted and dumped in th basket and held at 200 F for the first hour of the cook, then up to 240 for the remainder of the cook. When the brisket reached 170 F I wrapped it in foil with a small amount of water and a layer of sauce because it lookd drrrryyyy! The brisket was pulled at 180 F and rested roughly 45 minutes. No aroma from the lump was noticed, just the smoky smell of pecan when the meat was put on the cutting board.:-D The down side is that it didn't have enough bark, was just juicy enough but leaned towards the dry side, too salty for my tastes and just tender enough to cut with a fork with moderate pressure.
Sorry about the picture quality but all I could get my hands on at the time was my cell phone.
