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OK, so I've been hanging around here since 2007 learning about cooking with charcoal and how to smoke with a Performer, but finally broke down and bought a WSM. Spent a while trying to figure out whether to get an 18" or 22" but in the end I went into the store, looked at the two models side by...

Very nice. It's hard to beat ribs and roasted corn done right. The settings you mentioned (top open, bottom 90% closed) seem to work real well on my kettle as well.

We had a Lhasa Apso ("Truck Stop Trixie") who had a recurring problem with bleeding gums. Several trips to the vet didn't help. One day I came into the backyard by a different route (so she didn't get a warning from the gate opening) and found her gnawing happily on the grill brush, as she had...

That's impressive It's hard to see through the smoke, but looks like ~6 racks on top and 3 on the bottom ?

I guess deciding what size WSM to get is partially a function of what you already have. In my case I have a Performer which I use a lot for short smokes (ribs, chicken etc..) and I'm looking at a WSM mostly for easier overnight smokes rather than to handle really large amounts of food. I'm kinda...

Interesting... that option never occurred to me (using a WSM for high heat cooks). I ended up buying a Performer because I wanted to be able to grill and do some smoking, but I found myself doing mostly indirect cooking anyways. As you point out, a WSM could have done that indirect cooking just...

Yep. A Weber chimney on even the Performer's small gas burner works really well. I'll time it next time I cook, but my recollection is a few minutes with the burner on to get the bottom coals going then something like 10 minutes before I'm ready to cook (less with lump).

Just noticed this is about a day and a half too late, so guess it's mostly a "so how did it work out ?" post... I've never been totally happy with wings done on the Performer, but all the recommendations suggest 1-2 hours indirect. The tenderloin is a lot larger than a wing but you're cooking...

Your post reminded me of the main reason I never learned to grill until recently... I never had any particularly good experiences that would motivate me to learn. Backyard BBQs were mostly bugs and bad food, and I bought a Performer more as a "smoker that I can do other stuff with" than as a...

Cheating is when the pizza arrives in a cardboard box I would say that making the dough is one of the easier steps, and that you're already doing all the hard stuff. I'm particularly impressed that you are getting pizzas that size onto the stone. Just finished what was probably the best...

Yum. Those all look great. Derek, are those pizzas made on the shiny pan that comes with the oven insert ? That's a *big* pan and your pizzas seem to fill it right up. I had been thinking of semolina as "just another flour" but after reading up on it a bit it seems to work a lot better for...

Whoa, parchment makes it real easy !! Just tried assembling a pizza on a piece of parchment with the corners trimmed off. It slipped onto the stone easily, and even landed in the middle of the stone rather than hanging off one end. That part could be luck though. The temperatures were low --...

Congrats on the new arrival. Hope you'll really enjoy the Performer -- between the work surface and the gas lighter (aka chimney starter ) it adds just enough convenience that you won't keep wanting to use gas.

I have been pretty fortunate and only worn those expressions on two occasions (although the second time lasted a few days). The first was when I was learning to do long slow cooks on my Performer with a big pile of coals on one side behind a couple of firebricks, with a few lit coals placed on...

I think so... I was going to : - put parchment on peel - build pizza on parchment - slide pizza onto stone, parchment and all - hope to be able to slide parchment out from between pizza and stone after a minute or few If I were making multiple pizzas I guess we would build on parchment, then...

They work great in the oven, nothing wrong with them AFAIK. They just weren't designed for the extra stress and abuse you get in a charcoal grill. My *guess* is that you would be OK using the PC stone as long as you put it in before the grill heated up and kept it back from the coals as much as...

Interesting question. I was using a typical sheet metal pan - it heated up too fast and so the bottom of the pizza burned before the top was fully cooked. A bit too far along the crisp -> char -> burned black continuum for me. A cast iron pan might work really well if it distributed the heat...

I'm still a bit dubious about these "explosions". Seems like all the articles with detailed explanations of what went wrong end up basically saying "owner did something really stupid" and talk about "fires", but all of the "explosion" stories have no details at all. My current theory is that...

Seems like it should work OK... it just adds another "piece of ring" that bolts between the ends of a 22" to make the ring larger. Following the tradition of "shoot what you eat" (do I have that backwards ??), here is a pic of tonight's pizza. Think I'm getting the hang of this. The oven insert...

If the recycle truck hasn't come yet and you can get hands on a round file it might be worth trying to bevel the ends of the slots at a 45 degree angle so the pizza doesn't hang up there. Just a guess though...