valve90210

Excellent, I shall try to catch one or other...if my little monster plays ball...

It's aquite a small peice so I think the burnt ends might be quiite a lot of work for not a great deal of meat, so think I'll go for the thin slicing - might borrow my Mum's meat slicer so I can get some really nice thin slices. I really must get myself a decent brisket from wilkes at some point now I feel a bit more confident with what I'm doing and don't mind spending a bit more money on decent meat as I'm fairly sure I'm not going to ruin it. I remember you saying you get a slightly different cut from them for a brisket but I can't remember what it was called.

Will you have wood pellets with you for sale by any chance? I'm hoping to come along with my parents and my little monster at some point over the weekend, and could do with stocking up on pellets as I've almost used up my supplies - smoking every weekend has become a bit of a habit methinks!

I bet they were delighted with the food, a great way to have a do!! I can see that the taste of lamb isn't to everyone's taste. I'm hoping a combo of pulled pork, pulled lamb, beef brisket and meaty ribs will impress my friends next weekend - and ruin the old fashion sausages and burger type bbq for them forever!!

Ah that's good to know, thanks, I shall give them a call later and put in my request! Wow, that really is a bbq load, must have been quite a spread!! I know you don't really apporve but I did a pulled lamb shoulder over the weekend which from the little I tasted whilst pulling, was delicious!!

Great to see those pics Wade as I'm picking up my first racks of meaty ribs from Wilkes this Thursday to be smoked over the weekend then vacuum packed andfrozen ready for the following weekend when I'm away with friends, so great to have a reminder of exactly what I'm doing as I've mainly be doing pulled pork and brisket of late.

Over the weekend I smoked a shoulder of lamb (which has turned out beautiful - photos to come when I eat it in a couple of weeks) and a bit of brisket. The brisket looked ok, not massive but a reasonable piece of meat and certainly better than some I have smoked before. It took about 5 hours or so to cook and get to temp but having given it a good long rest I sliced it and gave it a try and have to say I was somewhat disappointed. It tastes nice but it's just a bit tougher than I'd like, none of that lovely fall apart crumbly sort of texture as you eat it. I've vacuum packed it and stuck it in the freezer for now but was wondering if there was anything I could do to improve it? Once I've vacuum packed meat I normally reheat it in a water bath which works nicely, and I wondered if giving this brisket a longer and slower reheat than usual in the water bath might help improve the texture a little? Any thoughts?

I was pottering around with my smokers over the weekend and had a look at the bottom of the Callow, defintiely some damaged powder coating, it's bubbled and cracked in an area on the outside, interestingly though there didn't seem to be any damage on the inside? Naturally I completely forgot to take any photos, will try to get some this week at some point.

ooo Mulled Cider sounds amazing! Any chance you might be so kind as to put up a recipe here please?

I had the exact same issue with the charcoal rack on my el cheapo kettle. I ended up putting 5 nuts and bolts through the body all round to support it, which seems to work really well. That's really handy re the elbow. Good to hear it ran well yesterday. As luck would have it on my kettle there aren't any vents in the body, the air inlet is in the middle of the bottom along with the ash collector.

That looks great, will be interesting to see how well it works. what happens with the ash in your kettle? Sadly I can't do the same on my kettle as the bottom where the ash collector is and where the air inlet is, is a 3 inch hole... I'm wondering about just drilling hole and mounting the fan adapter on the side bu opposite where the coals would be, I probably wouldn't even need the snorkel type thing I've designed as I think the fan blows hard enough to push air all the way to the coals...

If I'd thought about it I'd have stuck a probe in the area of the coals to see how hot it was in there.

The 140C was at the top grill, the bubbling is right down at the bottom on the smoker which probably and inch or so away from coals which were getting incredibly hot from the fan blowing for so long. I'll get a pic this evening if I'm home before it's dark.

I had a look at my QMaster Lite last night and as I suspected, I had accidentally changes one of the settings while fiddling which will have had some effect on it's operation and kept the fan running much longer than necessary once temperature had been reached. For future reference, the supplier recommends the settings below but says that with trial and error the settings can be changed and optimised for your own smoker (if you feel so inclined): P = 5 I = 0 D = 2 Having reset mine back to these settings and giving it a test using my oven, it was definitely behaving itself better last night. I will try to get photos up later of it how I set it up on my Callow.

Hi Steve, yep, where the coals had gotten rather hotter than normal because the fan was constantly blowing the temperature eventually rocketed up to about 140C. I think the issue was just that I put the fan on too early, literally just after I'd put the water pan in and closed the lid so the temp, normally the smoker takes about 45 - 60 minutes to gradually build up to 110C but of course in having put the fan on so soon it was blowing for like 20 minutes or so which the coals loved... and they got super hot. Probably didn't help that I had also put a foil baffle around the edge of the fire basket. I'd done this because on the Callow the air vents are quite high up and I was concerned that the air from the fan would just blow against the side of the fire basket and not reach the coals. I figured the baffle would meant he air had to go down and through the holes in the bottom of the fire basket...which it very much seemed to do... The age old adage of only changing one thing at a time and seeing what happens would have been very wise, and thinking through when to start using the fan would definitely have helped too! Still, the meat turned out nice....

On Saturday I used my new QMaster Lite mounted on my Callow smoker, sadly in my slightly too tired state it didn't occur to me to let the smoker come up to temperature before switching on the ATC so of course the fan was blowing like mad for ages and got the coals incredibly super hot...which has caused an area of the powder coating to bubble up. I've not full investigated the extent of the bubbling as yet as I've not had the time to do so this week but I'm just wondering what I might use to protect the smoker if the coating crumbles off, would something like high temperature stove paint be ok?

Good thinking, I'll drop him an email.

My one just comes up with numbers - I think P = was something like 5 or 6 rather than values like 30 seconds...

Steve, any chance you might be able to check the settings for P, I and D on you Qmaster Lite please? I was fiddling around the other day trying to calibrate my probe and I think may have accidentally changed something as when I was using it it seemed slow to react to changes in it's temperature reading when the fan was blowing, which it didn't seem to be when I initially tested it....

That is a thing of beauty!!!

I noticed this over the weekend, my temps were nice and steady then the sun came out and they increased by a good 10C or more and it wasn't even a particularly hot day!

I just used my normal sous vide bags. Having put the juices in a jug in the fridge they weren't really liquid when I was vacuum packing them, I scraped off the top layer of fat and was left with a lovely jelly which is nice and simple to pack, as you can see below. Before vacuuming: After vacuuming:

No worries, I figured it was pretty simple. Any thoughts on my issue with mounting the fan on my kettle?

Cheers for this...any idea what the settings mean? I'm assuming it's to do with the frequency of polling the probe and how the fan reacts etc. How do you calibrate the probe? Is it a case of sticking it in boiling water and then adjusting the QMaster until it reads 100C?

That's be great, cheers.