u/AcrobaticSwitch8226

Alright fellas, so picked up a slow n sear xl for my 26 Weber, liked the simplicity of it and am not complaining. Picked up a 4 lb pork butt, I understand that is small but I felt it made sense! Turned out pretty good, needed to let it go a tad longer as the very middle wasn’t as tender but I wanted to eat. Ended up smoking for like 6 hours and then wrapping for the final 1-2 hours just to speed things along. I finally bought a thermometer for the meat and ambient and wow that is helpful. Hit a stall at like 142 degrees oddly enough which is when I decided to just wrap as the bark was good enough for me.

As for the lid thermometer which is what I was going off of last time and subtracting like 50 degrees, wow I was wrong. Lid thermometer on the 26” seems to be a difference of like 100-150 degree difference…. Yea so I was smoking ribs last time at like 200 probably 🤣

Overall I am pleased, hard to mess up a butt, so will do this more to really dial in temps, ended up sitting at the 250-275 degree mark which worked out great. Thanks all for tips last time as well.

Alright bear with me, tried smoking ribs for the first time in my Weber kettle 26” and boy was it a ride. First off I did not have an ambient temp probe, so was going off of the lid thermometer and subtracting like 50 degrees to give me a ballpark grate temp. Essentially I got my snake set up, put the ribs on at like 1 ish and immediately had troubles getting the lid thermometer to go above like 270 with vents fully open. After one hour it just wasn’t working so I lit a few more briquettes in a chimney and added those and that seemed to help a lot. Also added another row of briquettes so was running a 2x2x1 which just seemed excessive but whatever. I was able to get it to hold between 300-350 on the lid temp for awhile with a few times dropping to like 290 ish. Essentially I ended up being like 7 ish hours in and they still were not as flimsy as I would like. I am pretty positive they were cooked at too low of a heat and things got too stiff or something. They weren’t bad, worst part was truthfully the seasonings so now I know not to use those anymore. Definitely could be more tender. A little on the dry side but really not as much as you’d think. Another thing I noticed was the smoke flavor was a little harsh, pretty sure since it was too low of a temp, I ended up with a lot of dirty smoke. Bark looked great though, I just ran them unwrapped by advise of many and in hindsight since it wasn’t working I should have just wrapped them. Oh well, leftovers will go in the oven wrapped and turned into pulled pork. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I’m new to this 🤣