Chris Jones
New member
I got a WSM about a week ago, and did a first test cook with no meat that went poorly. I had trouble registering for this forum, and by way of explaining that I was legitimate, emailed about my attempt to register and the issue I wanted to post about. This was the extraordinarily helpful reply I got from Chris Allingham:
I followed his instructions exactly yesterday, along with using a bunch of stuff I learned from the virtual weber bullet website, and it was a huge success. So, many thanks Chris!
For the record, I was using the Kingsford charcoal recommended on the website, plus pretty much everything else recommended there (starter cubes, gloves, chimney, etc). I will post my notes from my cook in the next post.
As for your question...you don't say what kind of fuel you used or how much you used, but whatever it was, it wasn't enough if you ran out at 2 hours. Still, it's not a realistic test to run the cooker without meat, because when you add cold meat, that 350*F you experienced at the beginning will plunge to 200*F and you'll be writing back to me asking why you can't get the cooker temperature UP HIGH ENOUGH.
You can run the WSM at 270*F using the Minion Method and with the water pan empty, and that would be my recommendation. Place 3-4 smoke wood chunks on the charcoal grate, fill around them completely with charcoal all the way to the top of the charcoal ring, leaving the tops of the wood chunks exposed. Then light 30 briquets and spread them over the top of the unlit charcoal and the chunks. Put the water pan in the cooker but leave it dry. Put the meat on the top grate. Set your Flame Boss to 270*F and adjust the vents per Flame Boss recommendations. You should have enough fuel for 9 hours at 270. For that last hour at 295*F, you can try bumping up the Flame Boss to that temp and giving the coals a stir to see if there's enough fuel left to get the job done, but you may consider just moving the foiled butt to a 295*F oven...at that point, a foiled butt doesn't know the difference between a charcoal fire and your gas/electric oven...BTUs are BTUs.
I followed his instructions exactly yesterday, along with using a bunch of stuff I learned from the virtual weber bullet website, and it was a huge success. So, many thanks Chris!
For the record, I was using the Kingsford charcoal recommended on the website, plus pretty much everything else recommended there (starter cubes, gloves, chimney, etc). I will post my notes from my cook in the next post.