A LITTLE MODDING AND A LITTLE COOKING...
I think we almost forgot that the Smokefire is for cooking. With my front shelf project on hold because I didn't use my tape measure properly, I decided to dip into the recently arrived box of goodies. What I found was some stainless #100 mesh. I cut two pieces and clipped them to the main heat deflector/tent/house/triangle/roof/hood/discronificator. I wanted to see if ash would be reduced, especially during cook around 275-300 degrees. Now here's the deal, I'm hungry. I just got back from the butcher shop again. The dudes are starting to think that maybe I want to work there. I told them this is too close by for comfort. So it was $50ish last night and another $70ish tonight, but they had those bacon wrapped fillets again from an earlier cook. I bought four of them, more sausages and a rack of baby backs.
So first, let's look at this stainless mesh I bought:
Is it going to work? Who knows. I do know that after running it for a while, I hardly saw any ash on the grates and it was minimal on the outside of the unit. I didn't do anything special with this stuff. I didn't try to cut it to conform to the chamber or anything. I just draped it down in there and hit the go button. I used some stainless bag clips I had laying around. I really want less ash during longer cooks. If I'm running hot and short duration, I don't care so much about it.
I noticed that the flame exiting the right side has much less to do with temperature and more to do with over-fueling. This is because I vacuumed it out and it had a hard time starting up. I forgot to drop some pellets in the fire pot, but it did start up OK. It just didn't start up well, and as a result it started feeding in fuel when it wasn't quite ready for it. That caused a lot of side exiting flame when the EX6 was sub-200 degrees. The mesh didn't seem fazed by this at all.
Now, let's get to the food:
I'm going to run the EX6 at 275 degrees until the internal is at 105 and then I'm going to bump it up to 375-400 to finish to 133ish. Then rest for 10 minutes before eating. I added some fresh ground kosher salt and pepper to both sides, along with a little avocado oil drizzle.