I want to make a thread about some of the tips to reduce the amount of acrid tasting BBQ and white smoke so that other new WSM owners don’t end up throwing perfectly good meat in the garbage as I have done more times than I’d like to admit in my fledgling BBQ career. Feel free to contribute any other tips you have as well. I am by no means an expert, and am still struggling with trying to control not having acrid tasting BBQ but part of it is due to not following tip #1 here.
1. The WSM takes a little while to actually start burning clean. Ideally, you don’t want to see any smoke at all before you put any meat on the pit. I like to light mine with the minion method with the chimney overtop of the fire ring. Once the charcoals are glowing hot I dump most of them in the middle and the rest scattered around the fire ring. At this point put the top back on and open all the vents completely. Here is where you will see the most white smoke. You do NOT want to put your meat on at this point because this is dirty smoke and the pit is not ready yet. From what I’ve seen so far it take around 45 mins all the way up to 1 1/2 hours for the smoke to become clean and in most circumstances transparent or very close to. It’s at that point you want to put your meat on because that’s the sweet smoke you want your meat absorbing for the best flavour. The earlier white smoke is essentially imparting soot on your meat which will likely end up in the trash because it tastes so bad.
2. Its still not enough to wait an hour for the white smoke to clear. The next tip is to limit the amount of times you open up your grill to take a peak, and even more so opening up the door. There’s still unlit charcoal and potentially unlit wood in your fire ring and the act of opening up the lid/door too often actually draws in more oxygen, which the fire needs to grow stronger. Once the fire ring starts getting hotter because of all this new oxygen, it will start smoking dirty again. Obviously there’s times we need to open the lid to spritz for example. In this case I recommend just cracking the lid open a bit and squeezing your spray bottle nozzle in there pointed at the meat and spritzing it that way if you must.
3. Try to cook on calm non-windy days. This pretty much relates to the last point made, but all that wind is just feeding a ton more oxygen into your pit and makes maintaining temps nearly impossible. It was really windy last night and I decided to start up the pit with a dry pan. Combined with opening the lid once too many times and my temps were pushing 400F and would’ve only gotten hotter had I not doused the fire ring in water.
4. Grease management. As we all know, too much grease will start a fire. And an accumulation of grease in the fire ring can easily cause a fire. Dripping grease into a dry water pan will cause it to flash and can also cause a fire. If you must use a dry pan for your cooks I recommend using an aluminum pan on the lower grid in addition to tin foil around the top of the water pan as an extra measure of protection from flashing the grease.
5. Choke back your intake about 25 degrees before your target temp is reached. For example, if you are planning to cook at 275F try choking the intake back around 240-250F because it’s gonna keep climbing. The temp control on a WSM isn’t as responsive as the dial on a traeger, and while choking or opening up vents has a result on the temperatures, it’s far from instantaneous and takes some time to respond. Again, I live in a pretty Windy City so this may not affect everyone the same.
1. The WSM takes a little while to actually start burning clean. Ideally, you don’t want to see any smoke at all before you put any meat on the pit. I like to light mine with the minion method with the chimney overtop of the fire ring. Once the charcoals are glowing hot I dump most of them in the middle and the rest scattered around the fire ring. At this point put the top back on and open all the vents completely. Here is where you will see the most white smoke. You do NOT want to put your meat on at this point because this is dirty smoke and the pit is not ready yet. From what I’ve seen so far it take around 45 mins all the way up to 1 1/2 hours for the smoke to become clean and in most circumstances transparent or very close to. It’s at that point you want to put your meat on because that’s the sweet smoke you want your meat absorbing for the best flavour. The earlier white smoke is essentially imparting soot on your meat which will likely end up in the trash because it tastes so bad.
2. Its still not enough to wait an hour for the white smoke to clear. The next tip is to limit the amount of times you open up your grill to take a peak, and even more so opening up the door. There’s still unlit charcoal and potentially unlit wood in your fire ring and the act of opening up the lid/door too often actually draws in more oxygen, which the fire needs to grow stronger. Once the fire ring starts getting hotter because of all this new oxygen, it will start smoking dirty again. Obviously there’s times we need to open the lid to spritz for example. In this case I recommend just cracking the lid open a bit and squeezing your spray bottle nozzle in there pointed at the meat and spritzing it that way if you must.
3. Try to cook on calm non-windy days. This pretty much relates to the last point made, but all that wind is just feeding a ton more oxygen into your pit and makes maintaining temps nearly impossible. It was really windy last night and I decided to start up the pit with a dry pan. Combined with opening the lid once too many times and my temps were pushing 400F and would’ve only gotten hotter had I not doused the fire ring in water.
4. Grease management. As we all know, too much grease will start a fire. And an accumulation of grease in the fire ring can easily cause a fire. Dripping grease into a dry water pan will cause it to flash and can also cause a fire. If you must use a dry pan for your cooks I recommend using an aluminum pan on the lower grid in addition to tin foil around the top of the water pan as an extra measure of protection from flashing the grease.
5. Choke back your intake about 25 degrees before your target temp is reached. For example, if you are planning to cook at 275F try choking the intake back around 240-250F because it’s gonna keep climbing. The temp control on a WSM isn’t as responsive as the dial on a traeger, and while choking or opening up vents has a result on the temperatures, it’s far from instantaneous and takes some time to respond. Again, I live in a pretty Windy City so this may not affect everyone the same.
