A Beginners Guide To A Weber Grill

welcome back to smokey ribs this is episode 2 of my beginner's guide series today we're going to be focusing on a kettle grill a weber kettle to be more precise i do have a couple of kettles behind me but it's uh mainly just to show you a few small differences not going to focus a lot on that we're mainly showing you how to set this up how to run it how to get your meats to turn out exactly like you want we're going to get started right after this all right so here are my two kettles the red one is the weber kettle the gray one that is the s s grills i've just got that one recently now there are a few differences between these two grills not going to focus on that today that's not what this video is about the video is about setting up a kettle grill how to dial in your temperatures and how to have good results but now with that said for anyone interested in seeing a side-by-side comparison video more of a weber versus sns just leave it in the comments and i'll probably schedule that a couple of months out i've got probably two months of things lined up here so that would have to come later but just let me know if that's something you'd be interested in all right so here is the inside of my weber kettle now it's pretty grungy this thing is about three years old and i'm going to tell you one of the best tips right off the bat is when you're cooking on this put you a drip pan down in on your bottom grate the best you can to help catch a lot of that grease because otherwise you get it all gunked up this isn't real bad i did scrape it earlier and got a little ash left in there but you can expect that you know that's just the nature of it so the reason i have this opened up with everything cleared out i wanted to show you the dampers this is your bottom ventilation system and basically you can open and close this you can have it completely closed you can just have it cracked you can have it wide open so this kettle grill is going to be dependent on air being pulled in from the bottom now here in just a second i'm going to show you the top vent this is how you dial in your temperatures now if you're wanting to achieve a low and slow cook i'll get into that how to set the charcoal up but you would want to start off with this probably about a quarter of the way open you're wanting to keep those 250 to 275 degree temps so you don't want a whole lot of airflow now if you want it screaming hot up around 350 375 let it go wide open it's going to need all that air to get those kind of temperatures all right now let me show you the upper vent there again you can close it you can crack it you can go wide open if you wanted a very hot grill there again you would want this wide open you want the bottom wide open but this is how you adjust the temperature inside of this pit there is no knob to set temperature or anything like that it's strictly done through airflow now one thing webber did and i don't know why they did that you always put your vent over the meat okay always and they got the thermometer way over here on the other side and so the temperature that you're eating with that thermometer is the heat coming right off the charcoal so you can't really go by that thermometer it's going to be a lot hotter than what you actually have over here where the meat is so i would recommend going with a digital type thermometer you would insert your probes up under the lid or you can go through your vent holes you would probe your meat you'd put one at great level to really see what's going on inside this pit so that's basically in a nutshell it's not rocket science it's very simple you have to play with your bottom vents and your upper vents to get the temperature that you're looking for so let's put this into action and let me show you what i'm actually talking about here now this is your bottom grate this one's seen better days as you can see and on this webber you can expect yours to look just like this after a few years now these parts are replaceable what i'm going with is just a charcoal briquette you can use a lump charcoal in this or you can use a charcoal briquette the lump charcoal is actually made from real wood and it goes through a process where they remove most of the oxygen while they're burning it and it becomes very hard you know it becomes charcoal and the good thing about it is it it puts off a lot of good heat it actually burns hotter than the charcoal briquettes and that's my choice a lot of times but on this kind of grill it don't last as long as what the paquettes does and i'm doing a low and slow with this today so i want the briquettes in here and all i want to do is just bank them off to one side and i'll explain why here momentarily you can get real fast with this and really stack these up in a real neat orderly fashion or you can just dump them in here like i just did so i'm just going to take and move some of these around we don't need it piled up this high and this is what they refer to as a snake method and like i said some people they really do these doors just perfectly uniform i don't do that i don't have time for that this is all you got to do right here but you want this to wrap around just like i'm doing here some people refer to this as a snake method because it will be lit on one end and it will slowly burn around catching other coals as it's going and that's called a snake method a minion method it's also a stylum of a minion method all right so something just like this i didn't get all fancy with it just move them around try to keep it somewhat uniform that's looking pretty good right in here this will work all day long now basically what i'm doing once i put my grate in here my fire's gonna start over here and the food is gonna go over here just opposite from the fire is so as this fire moves around you have to also move your meat just opposite from it now this is what they call indirect cooking the only time you would cook right over the actual charcoal is for a real hot type type of cook like searing a steak or searing a thin burger or something like that where you would require some intense heat for all purposes primarily you will always want to go indirect and even if you do go direct you never want to put a whole layer of charcoal across this bottom always leave yourself a safe zone a cool zone to where things get out of hand you can move your meat over and not burn it to smithereens so always remember two zone cooking you got your hot you got your not so hot so i'm gonna go ahead and light this up what i've done these are called tumbleweeds these are fire starters there's different types there's some wax cubes you can get there's these tumbleweeds they've got some made out of some sort of uh other material and uh basically that's what gets it started let me fire it up so one thing i want to pay attention to before i do this is the position of my lower vent i'm gonna go about a quarter of the way [Music] right in here now while this is getting started you just want to leave your lid off give this time to get going good it's going to start this fire right here in this corner once it gets established from there like i said it will start slowly working its way across if you're wondering what i'm doing this is not about to cook i'm just doing a chuck roast to make some cool beef sandwiches with for our supper later tonight now i want to add smoke flavor to this meat so what i've got here you can use whatever you like pecan hickory this is post oak and you put it sporadically to where as this catches it also get your wood going to where it starts putting off a really good smoke now the chuck roast is pretty good piece of meat so i'm gonna go on actually i'm gonna put them close together you want the bulk of your smoke within the first three hours and we'll put one more back here that should be plenty of smoke you don't want to overdo it because you can't oversmoke meat but i think this would be just right based on previous experience so we've been going a few minutes and as you can see i'm starting to get a little white ash on the corners just a few more minutes maybe five ten minutes tops all this will be ashed over and at that point i can close the lid now i'm showing you how to set this up for a low and slow cook that takes hours this uh chuck roast i'll probably do an aluminum foil wrap on it to expedite cook but even with that it's probably gonna take four and a half four four and a half hours to cook now if i was wanting to get this up to 350 to 375 i would not start it like this what i would do in a case like that is i would take a charcoal chimney and i would fill that all the way up i would light it at the bottom and i would get that entire chimney burning i meant where everything's ashed over and i would dump it into my grill i would bank it off to one side to where i have my cool zone my safe zone and then when you put the lid on you're going to shoot up real quick and temperature because everything's lit and it might not be as much charcoal as what you see here i did this purposely because i know it's going to be a long cook i don't want to have to add charcoal at the end so i shouldn't have no problem this should just slowly burn around plenty of time but that's the two different ways you would set this up for charcoal really depending if you're doing chicken and you want to go at 350 degrees then by all means light all your charcoal at one time throw it in there bank it off and then you're up and cooking right away so for any of you that watched last week's video i did the live fire cooking i said in that video that you would be able to see how a lot of what i showed you in that video would transfer over into just about any smoke or kettle and i was referring to the two zone cooking basically uh the ventilation obviously is totally different on live fire because you got air surrounding it you're wide open and it's a different beast it has to be treated a little different but this when you put it in a cuddle and a smoker of any kind now you're able to trap heat in here and you can bring temperature up within the whole entire thing at great level similar to what you do in your your oven this is basically turns into an oven with ability to apply smoke to your meats and they all work pretty much the same and we're going to cover a lot of these your drum smokers bottom dent top vent even even electric smokers have a bottom vent and a top dent pellet grills they have ventilation system you're offset you have your lower vent and your upper vent they all do it's just that's the nature of it you have to draft air through in order to fuel your charcoal the fire and then from there you make adjustments to get it exactly where you want it all right so i'm going good enough i'm gonna go ahead and put the lid on this [Music] we're just gonna choke this down about about one-third open now i was saying earlier you could take a thermometer and you could run a probe under here to monitor your great temp i have used this webber long enough to where i don't need to do that i know this thing's gonna run around 250 to 275 where i had this adjusted at and so i'm just going to let this come up the temperature and while that's happening i'm going to take my my chuck roast i'm going to go ahead and get it prepped up and ready to go on here real quick before i go in there and take care of that meat i did want to show you one difference between these two kettles basically this is just like a weber other than the bottom then it has five of the blades for the dampers instead of three like the weber does this has the slow and sear this is where you put your charcoal it also has a water reservoir that you can slide in here and that adds humidity to it it's an accessory that they sell for the weber kettle over here but it also fits this perfectly it was designed this kettle was designed around this slow and sear this is how the company got started so i don't want to elaborate a whole lot on that but i will say one thing i am quickly loving this i have never seen a kettle grill be able to dial in temperatures as well as this one does and hold as you can see most of the charcoal in the corner is ashed over starting to get some really good heat off that it's time to put our meat on this is the chuck roast i added some worcestershire sauce for a binder just rubbed it down on both sides ends all all the way around now the seasoning that i'm using this is called chop shop by p.s seasoning and let me tell you this is a fantastic seasoning really designed for steak but it's going to really kick up this chuck roast i know it is smells incredible need to check that one out all right one thing i forgot to mention also when you're setting it up like this not only are you getting this heat coming over the dome which is cooking this side and browning and giving this color you're also picking up some radiant heat from this fire coming in on the side so from time to time you'll want to rotate this and flip this it'll let you know what it needs based on the way it looks you know its appearance now the slow and sealer the trough i showed you that uh the water trough that goes in there that creates a bear that stops and kills that radiant heat so all you're getting then is that convection going over the top so that's one advantage of that but there again this video is not about that so i'm going to say that for another video so here we go let's go ahead and put our lid on all right i've been going about two and a half hours during that time i have rotated it and i have flipped it trying to get color on each side i just checked it with the uh instant read thermometer i'm at like 135 but i want to show you real quick what we're looking like in about 160 that's what i'm gonna pull it off wrap it in foil and put it back on here to finish off let me show you real quick all right now i have flipped this one time and i have rotated a couple of times just rotating it around where all the edges darken up at the same rate because of that radiant heat i was talking about earlier we're gonna let it go on this side some now once i get this dark mahogany color all the way around and that should be around 160 degrees internal when i get there right now i'm at uh 139 so that's about 20 degrees away let's go ahead and close it up if you're looking you ain't cooking oh yeah that's getting a really nice color on it look at that i think i'm gonna go ahead and wrap last might check this it was like 155 internal and uh i'm sure we're around 160 i could check it but i'm not going by that so much as i am the color of it i mean look at the back side of it there that's just gorgeous perfect time to wrap so i'm gonna go ahead and remove this and wrap it we're gonna put it right back on here put the cover on it just let it go until it probes tender probably another hour to hour and a half i would guess all right so we have been going five hours exactly and i've had it wrapped now for like the last two hours i think it's been something like that and i've just been probing and i am probing around 212 but what i'm really noticing is just how tender this is look at that man just goes through like nobody's business all right this is done it's ready all i'm going to do is bring it indoors let it rest for maybe 30 minutes then from there i'm going to shred it now i'll inject some clips into this to where you can see just how well this turned out and hopefully we got a nice smoke ring and all we're going to do with this we're just going to shred it up maybe add some barbecue sauce and make sandwiches out of it won't be no taste test because this is not about the recipe about what i'm cooking but i do have to show you cooking with it to where you can see firsthand just how well the weber kettle works and i showed you how to lay the charcoal in there for this style of cooking low and slow so hopefully you got something from this if you're a beginner and you're taking an interest in grilling and barbecue and smoking meats then hopefully this is giving you enough information to where you feel confident to go get you a brisket even try that if you can fit a brisket on there then you can do it the same way now keep in mind a lot more massive meat it's going to take a lot longer to cook but this is exactly how you do it now you might have to add charcoal two or three times too this would not be enough charcoal to do a whole pack of brisket but with that said you can do it so i hope you all are enjoying this series so far next week i've got a special guest going to be helping me out and we're going to talk all about pellet grills so make sure you stay tuned to that until next time smoky ribs

Channel: Smoky Ribs BBQ

Views: 707,828

Keywords: charcoal grilling for beginners, weber kettle smoking, weber grill smoking, weber kettle grill recipes, weber kettle grill temperature control, how to use a charcoal grill as a smoker, how to use a charcoal grill to smoke, how to use a charcoal grill for the first time, weber, grill fire management, how to smoke chuck roast, bbq pulled beef, how to set up a grill, charcoal grill fire management, low and slow bbq, how to bbq on a weber grill, A Beginners Guide To A Weber Grill

Id: tfcjN1DNq_M

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021