Finally got the first cook in on the Cascade IVC!

Music Junkie said:

Full racks of St. Louis style and a huge pan.:becky:


My wife's large cookie pan has been stolen and placed in the BBQ arsenal. I had to replace it ten fold though.:shock:

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Thanks! Do you know what size it is and where you got it? I am definitely interested.

Thats a really nice looking smoker. Ya sound really happy with it which is what counts. How did you like the efficiency of the IVS?

Music Junkie said:

I thought it did great on the efficiency. I loaded the fire box about a third of the way with briquettes and pecan chunks and it used a less than half of that (guessing about 6-8lbs loaded and 3-4lbs burned). According to the Fireboard, the top rack was rock solid at about 245 and the bottom rack was at about 240. Total cook time was about 5hrs (3 unwrapped, 1.5 wrapped, .5 unwrapped). I figure I am gonna burn a lot at the beginning to get the larger pit up to temp, and then it will settle into a more efficient stage once its up to temp and the intake/exhaust are throttled down. If I took the time to warm the pit with a torch, I could probably improve on that. Heating so much area for small cooks is one of the things I did consider when making the purchase, but I was happy with the trade off for having the capability to cook more when I need to.

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Hmm... Sounds a lot like my first experiences with an IVS! In general I find that if I frontload charcoal with a small chimneys worth you can get a bit of a jump on the temp ramp. Like all things you enough planning ahead of time with your starting method of choice and controller is all you need. You just need to get a handle on how long it takes you to get up to temp.

It does make it hard to commit to a single rack of ribs or a chicken from time to time given the amount of charcoal that is involved. In reality once you get it dialed you can keep the charcoal use down & re-use a lot of it for future cooks so it works out as a net positive in my book. While briquettes will get you the distance for long cooks the lump is much easier to re-use for future cooks because it doesn't crumble from the moisture when sitting around. Overall my charcoal consumption has decreased since my days of owning & Kamado + UDS.

Happy Smoking Brother! Thanks for sharing pictures!

Like 80-90% of my cooks anymore are chicken or something that takes a similar time. So pretty short cooks.

I just make enough room to dump a chimney of charcoal in the basket and just leave the charcoal from the last cook in there. I’ll add more charcoal if I think I will need it for that cook in the back.

I use only one divider right now. So just a narrow run and then bunch of charcoal behind that.

Maybe if I was planning to do a really long cook I would load with fresh charcoal but I don’t do those often.