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Hi Wade, I use the ProQ coco squares which seem to last well now I’ve used the minion stack approach and start from the centre. See the other posts I note you’ve just commented on. I’ve had sand sat in my Amazon basket for a while now, though I was half thinking to get hold of 3/4 heat bricks and wrap them in foil to make it easier to clean up. I was also thinking of getting the smaller ProQ water pan so it acts as less of a heat deflector, but it wouldn’t be able to sit it on the brackets in the Frontier and I don’t want to start welding. I guess the benefit of sand is I can adjust the thermal mass to get the temperature to what I want. I might look at a tray to sit over it to capture fat. Useful info regarding the water and moisture thanks, it makes me less worried about swapping out from a water pan now.

Ah thanks for the info Wade. So if I used the smoker post-sous vide the reaction will still take place and the cooking of the meat in the sous vide doesn’t prevent that? There will still be the NO from the combustion so shouldn’t need to buff up the nitrate content. Plus the smoker will still give me the bark as the outside of the joint dries.

Thanks for the photo. Very useful I think I’ll give this a crack as mine tends to settle at 90 - 95degC, so hopefully the extra sealing will push it up over 100degC. I might also go down the sand route for better temperature control, but use a foil tray of water to keep some moisture in there.

I would recommend the ProQ coco briquettes they do. They can stack neatly so you can Minion it. As they take ages to kick off, I use blue bag charcoal in the chimney starter to get the cubes going. Last cook of 2020 and I did a double ring, 2 high stack lit in the centre and didn’t need to top up in a 6 hour cook, plus there was enough left for a couple of hours of fire pit to social distancely invite the neighbours round in the garden.

Tasted great too. A little bit of tweaking and I’ll have it nailed. Then we’ll move on to the next obsession! I’ve read up on sous vide then smoke, but I’m not sure if it’ll work? Would I be able to sustain the internal temperature of a huge lump of beef in the sous vide and then smoke it for 3 hours for a bark? Maybe bark it at a higher temp for a shorter period to prevent overcooking the already at temp inside? Would the sous vide prevent a smoke ring getting in? Lots of questions, but it’d make it easier than constantly trying to maintain the ideal temperature for a 16 hour brisket cook on the smoker.

Having had the sous vide boxed away for over a year since we moved, I was keen to find which box it had been stored in, dust it off and give it a go. We’ve been craving Chinese a lot recently and for gluten reasons we’ve been opting to do a fair bit of fakeaway to replicate as best we can. Having seen a char siu experiment on Sous Vide Everything on YouTube, we decided to give it a go. For gluten reasons, we didn’t use fermented bean curd (that and colouring gives it the luminous red look) and had to stick with tamari instead of light and regular soy sauce, but the flavour was pretty good, maybe a little over sweet. We ended up using a recipe from an Australian ex-pat in the end but stuck with the Sous Vide Everything approach of no marinade necessary, 24h at 63degC with sauce in the bag, baste with the sauce after sous vide, grill and top with the remaining sauce. All good, though I struggle with our grill so it didn’t crisp up the outside as much as hoped. But the texture was amazing. I thought 24h was overkill, so might try a 16h next time. I also found that foiling the top of the pan and wrapping round the Anova itself meant I didn’t have to top up the water at all.

Nice! Wish I had some spare cash kicking about. Next year!

£81.75 for the + on Amazon Black Friday. Meater themselves may drop it further on actual Friday, who knows?

Ah, I didn’t realise it uses the base to connect, I’d assumed it was direct from the probe to your phone. Makes sense, thanks for the feedback.

Hi, I’ve been looking at the + for a while now, partly because all of the extra cables on my ThermoPro just get in the way (or I thread them through the top vent, but then there’s not much slack when lifting the lid). I saw it for £75 on the Amazon Prime Day a while back so I’m expecting the price to drop again for Black Friday. One worth watching out for anyway. My question is, what’s the range like when it’s in an enclosed metal smoker? Does that cause issues or would you need to bridge it nearby which kind of defeats the object of the WiFi in the first place? Thanks, Ross.

Hi from Radstock and, up until a year ago, a resident of Bath.

Hi, thanks for response sotv. My temp log is on Excel on my laptop, but I can drag it out if needs be. In summary I t creeps down from 100 and into the low 90s if left unchecked, so sub 200degF in old money. When I’m trying to hit a 90-95 internal meat temperature the small temp differential would add hours to the cook and I doubt the fuel would last. I think overall I’m struggling to balance those users who can close off most of their vents and me who needs them all open just to hover at 100 (this is 4ish hours in mind).

Hi, new forum member. I joined as my Dad bought me a ProQ Frontier for combined birthday and Xmas (even though I’d only done 2 smokes on my Aldi Gardenline offset which I bought as a trial set), but that’s Dad - once he gets an idea for a present, he’ll stick with it. I read up on the very useful ProQ Tips thread in this forum, but I’m having the same issue as GuitarBloke (and CWC in GB’s follow on thread about sand). I struggle to get the ProQ to maintain 105degC without burning through a lot of fuel and with all vents open. Yesterday’s cook was admittedly in about 10degC weather, but I can’t see the ProQ being hugely susceptible to an outside variation of temperature, plus I’ve had the same issue when cooking in over 20degC over September. I tend to put two boiled kettles of water in the pan at start and I topped up twice during a 7 hour cook yesterday. I started with a 2/3 full basket of coconut cubes (direct from ProQ) and they were fairly well grey/glowing when I put them in the basket. I used the chimney to get a second half load up and running as chucking unlit coals on never really seems to get them glowing. Even with a mostly full basket of grey coals I struggle to get to the Nirvana of top vent 100% open and 2 of the bottom ones closed using the third to fine tune like others in the forum and elsewhere seem to achieve. Once things settle at around 225degF/105degC, at best I need 2 open and one maybe 50%, but after an hour or two I seem to need to open up the third fully and watch the temp slowly dwindle towards 100degC, then I start to have to think about firing up some more coals about 4 hours in. Initial research seemed to be that the ProQ was a dream to hit that 105 and keep on it for hours, but I’m not seeing it. I know the only real way to get it above for me would be to have no water in the pan, whereas it seems others would be able to take it to 250/275degF just by opening all vents. One technique I’ve not tried is Minion, but like I say, I struggle to get the cubes to take without the chimney and it’d take ages to paint them all yellow. I know they are a pain to get going, I use my Weber chimney with wood twizzlers underneath, a layer of restaurant charcoal, then cubes on top to make sure the charcoal gets the cubes to fire up. Am I using too much water throughout? Should I switch to sand? I note that didn’t seem to solve GB’s problem above though. Should I have more faith in the Minion method and trust that the cubes will take? My worry there is I’ll hover under 100degC, but maybe I just need to take the leap? Smoking is after all trial and error. Anyway, thanks for listening to my ramblings and apologies, but I am a metric child.