Smokin J's PIts
Full Fledged Farker
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2014
- Location
- College Station
Ok, so at the moment I am currently without a smoker other than my Mini. I have a small trailer pit but its being loaned out to a friend to try his hand and doing competitions. I honestly thought he would have already brought it back but he is still going strong and cooking 3 to 5 briskets a week trying to work out his schedule and flavor profile. Anyhow I just got my first Thermapen in the open box sale; I know I am a late bloomer. So Thursday I was running around the house checking the temps of everything, Friday I cooked a pork shoulder on the mini, but it wasn’t satisfying. My in-laws have wanted to buy a gas smoker for some time now and I keep telling them don’t I will make one, so this got me thinking, and I headed to my local Academy and ended up getting one of the cheap Masterforge gas smokers their 40” model. I had a total of 260 dollars’ worth of gift cards, of which 150 of it came from my in laws so I figured why not at a minimum it would give me the opportunity to run it see where its strong points and weaknesses are. This thing is a total pile of crap, looks like construction is about 22 gauge, temp gauge was off by 120 degrees, but it is laid out very efficiently. I ditched the “wood chip tray” and used the water tray to hold my wood chips to generate the smoke, I used mesquite chunks. I wrapped a cast iron griddle in foil and it went on the bottom rack to help even out the temp, and the brisket went on the second from the top rack and I put a disposable catch pan between the cast iron and the brisket. First note, you cannot cook low and slow with this, with a 7-13 mph wind, and a temp of 53, and set at the lowest it would go I could not get it to go any lower than 311 degrees, so hot and fast it is. I hate to say it but this was the best brisket I have cooked yet, and all three of my neighbors agreed that I need to ditch all of my other ways of cooking and build a good solid version of this. Game day one of my neighbors brought over three boxes of burgers from the A&M Meat Market, and asked if he could use the gasser. Put a catch pan on the bottom and cooked 33 burgers on the first go around and 27 on the second, we cranked it up to run at 500 degrees which was about ¾ of the knob and again we used mesquite chunks. I really think I like this style of cooker. Does anyone else have any experience building one, lessons learned kind of thing?