Smoking on a gas grill: Qualified success
Jul. 19th, 2014 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI bought a steel smoker box for my gas grill and experimented with it today. Got a 2.5 lb pork roast, rubbed it with kosher salt, black pepper, ancho pepper and thyme. Put soaked hickory chips in the smoker box, and got the whole thing going on the grill.
Problems: The smoker box sits under the grill grate in its optimal position, but that makes it very hard to re-fill with wood chips. So I ended up moving it on top of the grate, where it gets less heat and it's hard to get new chips up to a proper smolder. The grill itself holds smoke very poorly, but holds heat very well, which meant it was basically impossible to get the temperature to hold below 300 degrees.
Successes: I ended up with a very nice pork roast with a definite hickory smoke flavor in about two hours (and I probably should have taken it off sooner). Even ARR really liked it. This also means adding smoke flavor to things on a weeknight is totally feasible; the gaming group may be getting smoked chicken pieces or smoked turkey cutlets, and Jethrien wants me to do this next weekend with ribs.
Overall: I will probably fiddle with this more and learn to better control the temperature of my grill and the smoke production of the wood chips, but this isn't a substitute for a proper smoker, where I can keep the temperature down at 250 degrees and feed in more chips easily over four hours or more; and actually smoke the meat rather than smoky-roasting it.
Problems: The smoker box sits under the grill grate in its optimal position, but that makes it very hard to re-fill with wood chips. So I ended up moving it on top of the grate, where it gets less heat and it's hard to get new chips up to a proper smolder. The grill itself holds smoke very poorly, but holds heat very well, which meant it was basically impossible to get the temperature to hold below 300 degrees.
Successes: I ended up with a very nice pork roast with a definite hickory smoke flavor in about two hours (and I probably should have taken it off sooner). Even ARR really liked it. This also means adding smoke flavor to things on a weeknight is totally feasible; the gaming group may be getting smoked chicken pieces or smoked turkey cutlets, and Jethrien wants me to do this next weekend with ribs.
Overall: I will probably fiddle with this more and learn to better control the temperature of my grill and the smoke production of the wood chips, but this isn't a substitute for a proper smoker, where I can keep the temperature down at 250 degrees and feed in more chips easily over four hours or more; and actually smoke the meat rather than smoky-roasting it.
