Joe Milczewski
TVWBB Fan
I've been smoking on my WSM for about three years now and ran into an issue this past weekend that has me at a bit of a loss.
I was smoking a fairly large rack of spareribs. Temp was locked in at 225*. I use an iq120 ATC and recently re-calibrated my probes so I'm confident of my temperature readings. The ambient outside temp was about 80 degrees and dead calm (which is strange for Wyoming).
The WSM was cruising along for about three hours and as best I can tell never moved above 230* or below 225*. Unfortunately, after about that third hour a large thunderstorm rolled through. You don't get much advance notice on some of this high mountain storms so before I could get everything covered up the rain started dumping and we got wind gusts above 40mph. The outside temp with the storm also dropped into the low 60's. The storm lasted about 15-20 mins, and once it was done my internal temp in the WSM was down to 172*. It probably took me another half hour of stirring coals, etc. to get my temp back to the 225* range.
The end result was that it took me much, much longer to cook these ribs than I would have expected - even with the loss of an hour or so to the storm and then the recovery. I ended up pulling them after a little over 5 hours simply because we had to eat but they were nowhere close to ready. Cooked through, certainly, but not done in the sense we all know ribs should be. I estimate they could have stayed on the smoker another two hours to get them where I wanted them.
So here is my question after all that long-winded context: If you have a dramatic heat loss mid-cook, should it take that same amount of time to recover and be back on track, or is it almost exponential in the sense that losing a half-hour of time at your target temp actually means you'll probably need an hour, or two hours or more, in additional time to catch back up?
Put another way, if your product in the WSM is gradually increasing in temperature as it cooks at your target temp, but then starts falling in temperature due to external forces, how much longer does it take to re-attain that gradual increase in temperature? My guess after this weekend's cook is that if you lose a half hour in the middle, you'll need to add much more than that on the back end.
Curious for any thoughts from some of the experienced hands on here. Thanks.
I was smoking a fairly large rack of spareribs. Temp was locked in at 225*. I use an iq120 ATC and recently re-calibrated my probes so I'm confident of my temperature readings. The ambient outside temp was about 80 degrees and dead calm (which is strange for Wyoming).
The WSM was cruising along for about three hours and as best I can tell never moved above 230* or below 225*. Unfortunately, after about that third hour a large thunderstorm rolled through. You don't get much advance notice on some of this high mountain storms so before I could get everything covered up the rain started dumping and we got wind gusts above 40mph. The outside temp with the storm also dropped into the low 60's. The storm lasted about 15-20 mins, and once it was done my internal temp in the WSM was down to 172*. It probably took me another half hour of stirring coals, etc. to get my temp back to the 225* range.
The end result was that it took me much, much longer to cook these ribs than I would have expected - even with the loss of an hour or so to the storm and then the recovery. I ended up pulling them after a little over 5 hours simply because we had to eat but they were nowhere close to ready. Cooked through, certainly, but not done in the sense we all know ribs should be. I estimate they could have stayed on the smoker another two hours to get them where I wanted them.
So here is my question after all that long-winded context: If you have a dramatic heat loss mid-cook, should it take that same amount of time to recover and be back on track, or is it almost exponential in the sense that losing a half-hour of time at your target temp actually means you'll probably need an hour, or two hours or more, in additional time to catch back up?
Put another way, if your product in the WSM is gradually increasing in temperature as it cooks at your target temp, but then starts falling in temperature due to external forces, how much longer does it take to re-attain that gradual increase in temperature? My guess after this weekend's cook is that if you lose a half hour in the middle, you'll need to add much more than that on the back end.
Curious for any thoughts from some of the experienced hands on here. Thanks.
) . I added more briq's and within 20 minutes (maybe a bit more but I've never made that mistake again) it was back to normal.
