The Second Smoke/BBQ

The first smoke was very successful, but the smoke wood from the garden (black currant twigs) left room for improvements.

I got indications from my dad and my grandfather that there could exist a bunch of apple wood in our summer cabin's fire wood trays. On Friday I had a day off with my son Hampus, so we went there to find out whether we could find it.

Heureka! We found four to five buckets of excellent apple tree branches, between 2 cm and 12 cm across!

This time I felt more confident using the WSM, so I rounded up quite a bit of meat:

• 3 fresh chickens, 1.2 kg each
• 2 pre-cooked chickens, 1.2 kg each
• 1 pork fillet
• 4 thick pork ribs
• 4 Finnish sausages (Makkara)

I used the recipes from "Weber's Big Book Of Grilling" once more, plus my special Whiskey chicken recipe:

• 1x Dry Ribs: page 153 (minus celery seeds. Mustard seeds -> mustard powder. Fennel (Fänkål) was excellent!
• 3x Kansas City-style Spareribs: page 153 (Fresh garlic instead of powder. No celery or Worcestershire sauce in the sauce, added finely chopped tomato and broth powder (buljong) instead.)
• 1x Beer can chicken: page 227 (minus the beer can)
• 1x Whiskey chicken (see First Smoke, but don't forget the salt!)
• 1x Curry chicken (simply stuffed with three kinds of Curry, salt and Garam Masala powder)
• My mum prepared the pre-cooked chickens and the pork fillet, so I don't know what she made with them.

The weather's cold. It's -11°C and calm.

The apple wood was really something! Yummy!

I've brought some meat to my work for lunch and my colleagues seem to appreciate the aroma. They tried some ribs and they enjoyed them so much that I've promised them to BBQ on one of our partys!

I have to let the coals get started a lot more before assembling the cooker. It took two (2) hours to get the target temperature of 110°C (225°F) and it was only after I added another batch of 3 kg lit coals!

The temperature rose to 140°C (290°F) before I could make it decrease again.

After the cook, about 3 kg coals remained and they were fully glowing, so I guess about 3-4 kg would have been sufficient for this five hour cook in -11°C!

Use much less smoke wood, and remove the bark!

Of course I had to follow the advice on the site TVWB and make a log of the cook. Here it is:

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Spices for the dry rub.

More spices.

The grill area is kind of messy, but there is lots and lots of snow on the lawn. Observe the nice wagon.

The electrical fire starter in action. They are really good and fast!

The top grate loaded with pork fillet, thick ribs and the Whiskey chicken.

The pre-boiled chickens to the left. The Curry chicken and the Beer can chicken (without the beer can) to the right.

My son Hampus and my dad Lars try to hide behind the smoke plume.

Lars and Hampus.

The sauce to the Kansas City-style Spareribs after 10 minutes of boiling.

The recipes for Ribs.

The pork fillet is done.

The top grate is almost done after about 4 hours.

Macro photo of the Whiskey chicken.

Extreme macro photo of the Whiskey chicken.

Hampus can eat ice cream cones by himself (11 months old).