Soot Black Chicken

U

Utah Jake

Knows what a fatty is.
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I did 80 chicken quarters on my Lang 60 yesterday. I had filled the coal basket with Kingsford Competition charcoal, torched it up with my weed weed burner, and let it settle it to a bed of hot coals. When I got up to 300 I put on the meat. This dropped the temp to 150 for a long time so I threw on a load of unlit charcoal then some small wood. After a couple hours I opened to check temps and found everything black with soot, especially the meat on the top rack. All vents were wide open since I was trying to hit 300 degrees. What went wrong?
 
The unlit charcoal and wood most likely dropped the temp even more and caused the problem. If you added fully lit I believe your soot problem would not have happened.
 
Soot black equals creosote, which happens when the fire isn't burning clean.

I can't explain why it happened in your very awesome pit, other than maybe the unlit coals didn't get a clean burn for a while?

Only other reason I can think of is there was a LOT of white or brown sugar in the rub, and it burned horribly. But just by the Op's description It sounds like a dirty fire.
 
did you dump directly from the bag into the fire chamber? it might not have been soot, but charcoal dust.

with all the vents open there'd be quite a draft pulling all that dust right over your food.
 
That has never happened to me with my Lang60D. I've added charcoal and wood to keep the fire going and have never seen that happen. Is the smoke stack wide open ???? Do you keep your smoker clean...... thinking maybe you have some built up junk on the inside .....
 
Fire management and draft are most likely the main causes,.... then all that cold meat compounded the problem. It's not really a cooker specific problem, it can happen with about any kind of pit.

The real kicker here is that the same thing happens to folks all the time, only they don't realize it if they are cooking shoulders or briskets. Airborne deposits really show up on chicken and turkey. I've seen guys have deposits on chicken so heavy after the first 20 minutes or so, they can be wiped off with a paper towel, but ribs or something else on the same pit at the same time don't show them.
 
I shoveled the charcoal in so there was no dust. The bottom rack had kind of a sick gray tone with black deposit while the top rack was really blacked out. The wood was commercial well seasoned and there was no rub applied. Luckily the party of 230 turned out to be 175 so I was able to wash off the black and cover with sauce. The perfect chicken from my FEC100 got served first.
 
Black soot means your fire wasn't burning clean. Or the wood you added wasn't dry enough. When you're fire runs low (low temps) you need to build it back slowly. If you dump a shovel full of coals and wood on an ashed over fired you will stifle the fire and it will result in thick white smoke which in turns leave the sooty black residue on the food. The top rack was darker just cuz the smoke is denser up there.

When your fire is too low you're kinda already in trouble. Don't make it worse. Add fuel back to the fire a little at a time. That keeps your fire clean! :thumb:

Cheers
 
Utah Jake said:
I did 80 chicken quarters on my Lang 60 yesterday. I had filled the coal basket with Kingsford Competition charcoal, torched it up with my weed weed burner, and let it settle it to a bed of hot coals. When I got up to 300 I put on the meat. This dropped the temp to 150 for a long time so I threw on a load of unlit charcoal then some small wood. After a couple hours I opened to check temps and found everything black with soot, especially the meat on the top rack. All vents were wide open since I was trying to hit 300 degrees. What went wrong?
Click to expand...

You answered your own question. A load of unlit charcoal is going to smolder for awhile before it starts to burn clean.
 
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