All you performenr users...


 
B

Brad Greer

TVWBB Super Fan
Hey folks,
I have a 22 wsm and love it, and now that I am hooked on charcoal cooking I will never go back to gas. I would really like to get the performer with the autolight feature. Thoughts? Also, I was wondering if you guys ever do any smoking or LNS on your performers for smaller cooks?
Thanks!
 
I do 8-12lb butts and 10-14lb briskets on my 22.5 OTS all the time. It uses a heck of a lot less fuel than a WSM does.
 
Thanks for the info guys. Looks like a winner. I noticed in the posts that a lot of people use firebricks. On the new performer it looks like they have two half moon charcoal baskets. Is that what you would use to hold the charcoal? Are the firebricks being used as a heat cink?
thanks,
 
I have the charcoal baskets but use firebricks for long cooks, for a bunch of reasons :

1. Angled sides (like you get around the edge of the kettle) seem to work better than vertical sides (like you get on the baskets) when doing a small minion burn... with baskets I find that some coals around the edges don't burn.

2. Firebricks let you pack more coal into a small space, partly because of their height and partly because you don't end up with empty spaces around & between the baskets. Having all the coals together really seems to help make sure that most of the coals eventually burn. This also helps make room for a nice big foil tray/sheet to catch drips and avoid the creation of greasy ash monsters.

3. The firebricks shield the meat from direct heat from the coals, especially if you put a water pan. I don't normally bother with a water pan though...

4. Heat sinking effect, as you mentioned.
 
You generally need to go to a place that sells a lot of bricks (that sounds sarcastic but it's not intended to be). I never ran into them in the general home improvement stores, although a few of them sell "splits" (half thickness firebricks) for lining wood stoves at a considerably higher price, eg :

http://www.canadiantire.ca/AST/browse/3/HouseHome/1/HeatingAirConditioning/WoodPelletStoveAccessories/PRD~0642720P/Firebrick%2C+9+x+4+x+1.25-in.jsp?locale=en

If you do a search for something like "masonry bricklaying supplies chattanooga" then pick the least fancy web sites you should find them pretty quickly. Since they're just one more kind of brick they don't tend to get featured on web sites and therefore don't show up in search engines as much as you would expect. Main thing is that you want the full thickness (~2 inches) ones -- the splits are too thin to stand up on their side with a pile of charcoal behind them.

Once you have a couple of firebricks, you'll find you can do other things with them, eg use them to hold a pizza stone or pan higher up in the dome for better cooking.

BTW I cheated -- I had a couple left over from when my fireplace was being built ;)
 
I use a couple different extension rings with my Performer. I have an 8" rotisserie ring that I put SS bolts in to hold a cooking grate and a 16" extension that holds 3 cooking grates.

If I only need 1 cooking grate and don't plan on cooking more than 8 hours, I use the 8" ring. I set an old cooking grate on the bowl cooking grate tabs with a 8x18 inch piece of sheet metal (18-20ga?) on top of that as a heat deflector, drip pan on top of that, cooking grate on the SS bolts near the top of the ring. My every day indirect setup.

For longer cooks or when I need 2 cooking grates, I use the 16" ring. It can hold 3 cooking grates. The bottom one, which sits several inches above where the standard bowl cooking grate would sit. I don't put a grate on the std bowl grate tabs though. I load the bowl with charcoal and need the extra room. Deflector and drip pan on ring bottom grate and 2 cooking grates full of meat above that. I've never used it for an 18 hour cook, not that it couldn't, I just use my BGE for those. But it will cook a whole lot of chicken or ribs at one time.
 
John Boehm said:
Where do you buy firebricks?
Click to expand...

John,

Your local Ace Hardware likely has them. Probably have to buy an entire box, (about 18 bucks) but you'll never have to buy them again.

The box of 6 Rutland firebricks I bought 2 years ago still has 4 in them.
 
Any masonry supply that sells brick, block and stone will have them, when I was young my father and I built chimney's on tract homes, I have built hundreds of fireplaces which nowadays is a lost art! When using the firebricks I never thought I would be putting them in my BBQ
Danny
 
I'm a new owner of a Performer 22 with gas assist and so far just love it. Coming from a gas grill and electric smoker I am really enjoying the char-grilled/smoked flavour. My longest smoke thus far was 2 pork shoulders at 7 hours and I was very happy with the outcome. I really can't imagine much better flavour.

Now for big pieces of meat requiring long-long cook times I could imagine the Performer would need more hand holding with temps/fuel/venting compared to a WSM - but at this point I'm not needing such long smokes. I bought a ET-732 which I used last weekend for my shoulders and really enjoyed being able to be in the house doing stuff and not having to constantly watch the grill. Picking up some fire bricks this weekend. Good luck.
 
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I have the Gen1 performer and rarely if ever use the charcoal lighter. The Harbor Freight weed torch lights the fires of all my cookers.

If you love the 22" WSM, and have a Performer, investing in a Cajun Bandit Stacker or Kettle conversion kit will definitely up your game.

Firebricks are fine and dandy, but I took some charcoal rails and added expanded metal strips to them and can get adjustable amounts of fuel a lot cheaper and lighter than firebricks.
 
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