My latest test experience
 

My mom loved the pulled pork I made on my COS, and wanted my "recipe". I had
to point out to her that it's not so much the recipe as it is the way the
meat is cooked. Well, seeing as how she doesn't have a smoker, and all she
has is a small gas grill that's piped in to her natural gas supply, I
thought I'd give it a shot for her.

I showed up late friday night and tossed some stuff on for a rub, just my
normal Kosher salt, ground pepper, paprika, and a bit of garlic powder,
wrapped the stuff up and loaded it into the fridge for overnight. So, it
only got about 12 hours or so instead of my normal 24 hours in the fridge.

Fired up the gas grill the next morning. With the single burner set down to
almost it's lowest temp, I was able to achieve 225-250 at the grate, no
problem. The bigger problem was, she bought too much meat! So, I put one
piece up high and left the rest down below. She'd purchased a small smoke
box that was able to sit on her "lava briquets" on the heat side. I wasn't
able to get a lot of smoke into the meat because of this, and it cooked slow
for the first couple/few hours because I kept having to open the lid to
refill the smoke box (it was only about 6x4x1" or so).

After that, I just left the lid shut for the next 4 hours, rotated the
butts, and temp'd both ends. They were coming along nicely, but took about
2-3 hours longer than usual for me. I'm guessing it was due to the temp
fluctuations induced by me opening the lid to replentish the hickory chips,
and the fact that she had no weather protection and we were getting on and
off heavy rain. Damn sweet smelling smoke, though. The final product came
out pretty good, but not as much bark as I usually get, and certainly not as
much smoky flavor. But she was happy with it, as well as the BBQ sauce I
taught her to make. All in all, not so bad. :-)

I think next time, I'd just recommend she put in a flat sheet pan of some
sort on the heat side, and fill the entire thing with chips, to keep the lid
closed more often, and put up something over the grill to keep the rain off
of it, and the person tending it!








--Brett