Joshua Brown
New member
Hi all, I've been enjoying the sight for years. I'm a weber devotee with a stainless red performer, countless kettles that have come and gone, and a q300 for when I'm lazy. I've wanted a wsm for a long time, but could never justify the cost to the other half. Stumbled on a Cabelas clearance sale a couple weeks ago, and got the mini 14.5" wsm for about $120 (Missing its cover though 
). I really wanted at least an 18, but it was in the ballpark of affordability, and the only one, so I bought it. Brought it home, got yelled at "another bbq, I thought "we" agreed that you were done collecting bbq's". So it sat in a corner for a while for the heat to die down. Then she surprised me by buying an igrill2 for me for christmas, so I could "...make something yummy with that weird bbq you bought".
So I went for it. Last night I burned a full charcoal ring to burn off the assembly lube from the factory. This morning in my pajamas, I took a Jimmy Dean Maple Sausage roll and wrapped it in the basket-weave bacon everyone is so fond of. Did not add rub, because I don't know what I'm doing yet. Read Harry Soo's tips for breaking in a wsm, and decided to do my inaugural fatty without water in the pan. It's 35 degrees outside, and I'm being a good boy and keeping a log so as I develop my smoking skills, I can learn from my inevitable mistakes. I exclusively use Kingsford Blue, because I buy it in bulk on the summer holidays. I've read about the minion method and intend to attempt it, but the mini wsm charcoal ring is small, and every arrangement I tried ended up looking the same. So I put some unlit charcoal in a donut shape with a chunk of apple wood in the middle. Then dumped a half chimney of lit charcoal on top, filling the charcoal ring. Two bottom vents completely closed, one bottom vent wide open. Top vent wide open.
I'm about an hour in, got the temp fairly stable at 260 at the bottom grate, dome finally is reading a similar temp which is weird since earlier the dome dial was reading 30 degrees higher than the probe, so I might be hot but for now it is stable. Bottom 1 vent still wide open, dome vent is now at half. A downside to the mini, is that the vents are mini as well and setting them at 25% 50% 75% all looks about the same.
It's starting to rain lightly so I just put the igrill2 in a ziploc. I'll come back and update when done, but here are the starter pictures.
Update:
Total cook time of 2 hours. The bacon absorbed the vast majority of the smoke flavor. Still a small (1/16") purple smoke ring on the sausage. Both the wife and I enjoyed breakfast. The igrill2 is pretty neat, but not being waterproof, I ran out earlier and put it in a gallon ziploc with the probe wires sticking out a small opening. The BlueDuo I think has an advantage in that dept. The last hour of the cook went from a sprinkle to full on downpour, and at one point the snow flakes were coming down. Good thing I started when I did, as the smoker starting dropping temperature as the rain picked up. Another thing about the igrill2 is the temp graphs are setup to share with facebook, but I'd prefer an excel export or something that I can play with. Also, I turned the base off to pull the probes and when the base is off you lose the ability to see your graphs (I think). So I had to plug the probes in later to get the graph back. So ignore the data past the 11:45 mark. Glad to be here, look forward to learning more. Any comments, criticisms, and suggestions are appreciated as I need to learn. On to the pics:
update: if you tap the graph in the igrill2 app, then hit the "more" button you can export the data into a csv file. You have to do it for each probe, and the time polling doesn't match perfectly so you have to play with the data. A much more helpful graph of my smoker ambient heat variance is here. I filtered the above mentioned csv's in excel, then made the graph in plotly. See link below.
1st smoke graph
). I really wanted at least an 18, but it was in the ballpark of affordability, and the only one, so I bought it. Brought it home, got yelled at "another bbq, I thought "we" agreed that you were done collecting bbq's". So it sat in a corner for a while for the heat to die down. Then she surprised me by buying an igrill2 for me for christmas, so I could "...make something yummy with that weird bbq you bought".So I went for it. Last night I burned a full charcoal ring to burn off the assembly lube from the factory. This morning in my pajamas, I took a Jimmy Dean Maple Sausage roll and wrapped it in the basket-weave bacon everyone is so fond of. Did not add rub, because I don't know what I'm doing yet. Read Harry Soo's tips for breaking in a wsm, and decided to do my inaugural fatty without water in the pan. It's 35 degrees outside, and I'm being a good boy and keeping a log so as I develop my smoking skills, I can learn from my inevitable mistakes. I exclusively use Kingsford Blue, because I buy it in bulk on the summer holidays. I've read about the minion method and intend to attempt it, but the mini wsm charcoal ring is small, and every arrangement I tried ended up looking the same. So I put some unlit charcoal in a donut shape with a chunk of apple wood in the middle. Then dumped a half chimney of lit charcoal on top, filling the charcoal ring. Two bottom vents completely closed, one bottom vent wide open. Top vent wide open.
I'm about an hour in, got the temp fairly stable at 260 at the bottom grate, dome finally is reading a similar temp which is weird since earlier the dome dial was reading 30 degrees higher than the probe, so I might be hot but for now it is stable. Bottom 1 vent still wide open, dome vent is now at half. A downside to the mini, is that the vents are mini as well and setting them at 25% 50% 75% all looks about the same.
It's starting to rain lightly so I just put the igrill2 in a ziploc. I'll come back and update when done, but here are the starter pictures.
Update:
Total cook time of 2 hours. The bacon absorbed the vast majority of the smoke flavor. Still a small (1/16") purple smoke ring on the sausage. Both the wife and I enjoyed breakfast. The igrill2 is pretty neat, but not being waterproof, I ran out earlier and put it in a gallon ziploc with the probe wires sticking out a small opening. The BlueDuo I think has an advantage in that dept. The last hour of the cook went from a sprinkle to full on downpour, and at one point the snow flakes were coming down. Good thing I started when I did, as the smoker starting dropping temperature as the rain picked up. Another thing about the igrill2 is the temp graphs are setup to share with facebook, but I'd prefer an excel export or something that I can play with. Also, I turned the base off to pull the probes and when the base is off you lose the ability to see your graphs (I think). So I had to plug the probes in later to get the graph back. So ignore the data past the 11:45 mark. Glad to be here, look forward to learning more. Any comments, criticisms, and suggestions are appreciated as I need to learn. On to the pics:
update: if you tap the graph in the igrill2 app, then hit the "more" button you can export the data into a csv file. You have to do it for each probe, and the time polling doesn't match perfectly so you have to play with the data. A much more helpful graph of my smoker ambient heat variance is here. I filtered the above mentioned csv's in excel, then made the graph in plotly. See link below.
1st smoke graph
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