My WSM arrived today - first smoke


 
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David Games

TVWBB Member
Got home this afternoon and the WSM18 that my wife gave me for anniversary present arrived today. Woohoo!!

Last night I poured a small concrete slab to place it on next to my gas grill
new slab

I'm not going to smoke on the slab tonight to give the concrete another night to cure.

Bought a couple whole chickens to try for my first smoke tonight. Also bought a back of 3 slabs of spare ribs to try tomorrow night.

For the chicken tonight, I am trying to do the "Jailbird BBQ Chicken recipe" from the "BBQ Wisdon of Harry SOO" link.

Started the charcoal up. Holy moly, the Weber chimney produces some serious heat really quickly
chimney starting

http://i1241.photobucket.com/a...games18/IMG_0110.jpg
Dumped the lighted charcoal on here

Put it together and also threw on a few links of Italian sausage to see how that would turn out.

meat added


closed to start smoking

I am curious to see how these turn out.
 
Got a few questions.

Right now, all I have for smoker temp monitoring is just the dome temp gauge. Do I need to go out and buy something else to monitor the temp or can I do pretty well just going off of the dome?

If I need something else, what should I get that is reasonably cheap?


If I am using the dome, does it generally run higher or lower than the cooking zone?
 
im pretty new here but i think you should buy a meat thermo and grate thermo. maverick has one on amazon for pretty cheap and its invaluable. i think there is one fore 33 dollars and another for 55
 
The Jailbird Chicken turned out great on Friday night. Saturday I did 3 racks of St Louis ribs plus the trimmings from the ribs. I also used Harry Soo's rib method (SYD rub, foil after 3 hours with apple juice, brown sugar and agave nectar). They turned out really good, by far the best thing I have ever smoked or grilled.

In hindsight, I think I did a better job with the minion method on the second night than the first. For whatever reason, the charcoal almost immediately burst into flames on Friday and already had lots of gray within 5 minutes. I think it ramped up the temp pretty fast that night, although that was OK for the chicken. Saturday, the charcoal light was much slower and I ended up dumping the lit coal with much more black showing than the previous night. As a result, the temp came up a little slower and it seemed easier to keep the temp under control.

Anyway, I am pretty psyched with the results so far. Thanks for the help from this board.
 
I would unscrew your Weber lid thermo and test in boiling water just to get some confidence in it. Some have been known to be as much as 20-30 degrees off.

I did my first two smokes using a candy candy thermo in my top vent and a meat thermo in addition to the Weber ld thermo. All went well. But I went ahead and bought a Maverick ET-732 myself so I could step away from the smoker in this Texas heat but still monitor the smoker and meat temps via a digital reciever.
 
David I've used nothing but my dome thermo and my Thermapen for all of my cooks and have had no problem. I really don't see the need for any extra thermos, especially if your cooking for home use. After a few smokes you'll be able to figure out how your WSM runs in terms of heat.
 
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