Questions about the first long cook with the HM


 
M

Marius Franke

New member
Hey everyone,

first off, I want to thank Bryan and everyone involved for the development of the HeaterMeter, it's simply amazing and I love every part of it. It works great and I really appreciate all the work that went into it!

After smoking some shorter things like bacon or a steak I tried my first pulled pork with the Heatermeter on saturdaynight last week and I got some questions about what went (if only a little bit) wrong.

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(note that in Germany we went from summertime to wintertime between saturdaynight and sunday -> 3am sunday became 2am, that probably messed with the graph, also all temperatures in °C)

Top vent position
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Probe placement
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I started the BGE around midnight at around 7°C outside and put on the pulledpork (1,6 kg) around 0:30, setting the temperature to 107°C (225°F). I did not open the lid until the fourth marker, I do not know what caused those two "lid open detections", my guess is that the wires from the probes kept the lid "open" just enough for some wind to get through - any ideas?

I'm also a little bit confused on why the temperature of my pulled pork rose so slow, since it was on the smaller side of just 1,6 kg I didn't expect it to heat up this slow, can you see anything wrong with my top vent settings or maybe my pit probe placement? My recipe said that it would take ~8-12h for a 5kg piece to get to 95°C (203°F), i barely reached 88°C when I needed to take it off after roughly 12h.

The pulled pork was still extremely good, I'm just trying to find out how to improve on it even further. If I forgot to mention anything important please let me know!

Thanks in advance!
Marius
 
I am no expert BBQ chef but have done a number of pulled pork butts over the years on my BGE. First, I use 250 F as I was never able to get the pork up to temp at 225F. Second, I put my top vents at half open for 250 F. Maybe having top vents full open caused some of the oscillations you have. I don't think your probe wires had anything to do with it, I have always had multiple wires into my egg.
 
That's a good lookin' butt you got there!

The automatic lid detection feature uses a percentage of the setpoint to determine when to activate. For 225F the standard 6% means the temperature has to drop 13.5F before it kicks in, for 107C that is only 6.4C/11.6F so given the oscillations you were having it was activating in error. You can knock up the percentage to 7% to make it closer to the way it works in fahrenheit. That's bigger swings than I would expect though. The default PID settings are also for fahrenheit, so if you haven't done so already I'd reduce them by 5/9ths.

The settings really should be independent of the units used, but unfortunately I think it is too late to change them now without messing up half of people's settings.

A 5kg butt would take like 16 hours I'd say, or even more, I'm not sure how anyone would be able to do that in 8h. I would have expected your 1.6kg piece to be done in 12 though. Maybe move the pit probe so it isn't over the foil pan where steam might be affecting the temperature reading?
 
Thank you for your replies!

I will adjust my PID settings by the amount you suggested Bryan, I wasn't sure if the switch to celsius was just visually and it used °F in the backround with the controller - now I know :)! I think I will also adjust my top vent settings, i never kept it open that much when smoking without any controller so it probably wont hurt to close it a little bit.

I mistakenly wrote 5kg and meant 5 lbs - oups. The recipe I was referring to is this one. I'll move the pit probe/pan next time so the won't overlap, but I'm not sure if it influenced it that much - I started of with water in the pan, but in the end all of it had evaporated anyway since i didn't fill it up again. Maybe I'll just skip the water pan and see how it turns out.

Anyway thanks a lot for your advice, I'm curious how it will go next time!
 
I switched to °F for my ribs today and used the settings Bryan mentioned somewhere else for a BGE and it turned out great! Currently smoking some almonds, last time they where a little bit burnt, so this time I'm stirring frequently...

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I'd say the temperature was pretty much perfect until I took out the ribs!

Next project: A porterhouse steak next week and pulled pork at christmas - I'm completely hooked :)!
 
Good to see! I'm going to do ribs this weekend. We use Celsius here in NZ too, but thanks to the predominance of the US BBQ scene on the interweb, I BBQ in Fahrenheit.

A good German name that (yes, I know Daniel F was born in Poland).
 
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