Recent content by Matt Ellis

Shoulda clarified, for the chicken I did run it hotter, up in the 300s and it came out great. I'm also using the dampers, but trying not to overreact. I'm probably just overthinking things and need to just relax and crack a beer!

Hey all, I've done a couple of cooks now (2 separate rib runs, a chicken, and a pork butt) and I've found that my WSM tends to run towards the hotter side (270-290) throughout these cooks. I purchased a Cajun Bandit door for my most recent cook as the original door left a pretty big space, so...

Thanks for the replies, everyone! I'm definitely gonna take this cook easy and not sweat it too much, really seems like you can't mess a butt up too much. Thing I'm most looking forward to is cracking the first beer in the pre-dawn hours! Might put me right back to sleep though!

Good call, Bob! Just got a new set of sharp knives, don't want to be wielding those when I'm still half-asleep!

Hey all, I'm going to be doing my first pork butt this weekend. Really excited as it'll be my first long cook. I'm not at the stage with my temp control yet where I'm willing to go overnight, so I'll be waking up early Saturday morning (3ish) to get everything fired up. My question is, should I...

I've got a ThermoWorks Smoke and for my first two smokes I've simply just run the wire under the lid and placed the lid back on. It seems to work just fine, there is no noticeable gap left from doing this that I can notice, the food has come out great, and I've even seen on ThermoWorks site that...

Good point on the brine, I hadn't considered that. I'm familiar with brining a bit so should be an easy step to add. Another question I just realized I had - what grate do you all place the chicken on? Looking at Chris' recipe for "Basic Barbecued Chicken" looks like he placed it on the lower...

Hey all, A few weeks ago I pulled off my first smoke, some spareribs that turned out great. A lot of (ok all!) the credit goes to this community and the info I found here. This weekend I'm looking to smoke up some chicken and just curious on what tips everyone has for that? I'm thinking I'm...

Hey everyone, After some more thorough investigation yesterday (and with some more info thanks to this thread!) I found out that the WSM is a 2004 model. And after I pulled it apart more it just appeared that the person had assembled it a little wrong. There are indeed all the parts necessary...

Awesome, thank you for the advice everyone! All of your help is very much appreciated and has me even more excited for my cook! I'll definitely be leaning on the experts here as I learn.

Hey there everyone. First off, just wanted to say thanks to this community, I've been reading it a lot lately to prepare myself for my first smoke this coming Sunday! I've been looking to buy a WSM for a while now, and out of the blue last Wednesday happened to find one for real cheap ($140) on...