Rib Cook In Progress - Which Temp to Believe - Grate or Lid


 
J

James Harvey

TVWBB Pro
Hi All,

I have 2 racks of backs on my WSM. Minion, 3 bottom vents at 20%, cool out with a bit of wind. My lid temp is 225 and my ET-73 at the top grate is 300+. I'm an hour in. Does anyone know which I should use? I'm leaning towards grate because it just seems like a more logical place to take measurement but I hate seeing the lid therm drop out of the smoke range to get to 250 on the ET. Both therms are tested and accurate as of a few days ago.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

James
 
Where exactly is the ET therm?

(I use lid exclusively and do not temp in two places. I think it's worth picking one placer and learning to work off of it.)
 
Ditto what Kevin said. Temp in one place and learn to make good Q by feel. That's probably the best advice I've been given by the experts on here. Learn what done feels like and use temps only as a guide.
 
Thanks Guys.

Kevin - The ET is attached via the supplied clip on the inner perimeter of the top grate ring, 2nd rail in. Ribs are a few rails over.

I agree that 2 therms in different places are apples to oranges but, if I want to actually be at 225 then I would expect the grate therm to be the one to adjust my temp to. Unfortunately, when I wrote the first post, the differential was 75 and closing vents to get to even 250 on my ET brought my lid therm down to 170.

Oddly enough, it's now been 3 1/2 hours and both are within 10F of each other.

Ribs look great so far anyway. Just foiled, returned and going to sauce in approx. 45 minutes.

I will learn to post pics soon.

James
 
I should clarify what I said earlier and maybe add a point. I'm new at this myself having only used my WSM about 10 times. What I'm trying to do at this point is make my techniques repeatable. I always use the minion method, add the same amount of lit on top, and adjust the vents at the same temps. By doing this, I'm learning what temp my cooker naturally settles in at so I can estimate when I should check for doneness. My hope is that doing these things instead of focusing on times and temps will help me learn what done feels like and make me a better cook. That's my opinion, remember how much you paid for it
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Its so easy to over complicate your temperature approach. I use a Guru with a pit probe, an ET-73 with a pit probe plus the therm on the WSM lid. Darn...they were all reading differently! To make it worse, the temp variation was 30 degrees in the spread.

Dome temp was 15 degrees higher than the Guru which was 15 degrees higher than the ET-73.

I agree with the previous posts....just pick one of the sources and learn to live with it. Thermapen the meat when you feel its close, and go from there.

In my case, since the Guru was controlling my pit temp, I elected to cook off that temp. Then it takes several cooks to get to the point you feel comfortable and trust the system.
 
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