Backyard Barbecue Basics: The Weber Smokey Mountain

greetings and welcome back to another episode of mancave meals and backyard barbecue basics now that we've finished up our cook on the Weber Kettle I wanted to take a look at our next cooker in the list this is a weber smokey mountain it is the eighteen and a half inch model bullet smoker that Weber puts out this is something that you can use if you really want to step up your low and slow smoking this guy is really what I'd like to call just a machine when it comes to low and slow barbecue this guy is designed to do low and slow barbecue and not a whole lot else and because of that it's really good at it if you remember in our cook on the kettle you know we had to we had to work at it a little bit you know to maintain our temperatures where we wanted it but this guy right here is real solid when it comes to maintaining low temperatures for a very long time I've cooked in this thing twelve and fourteen hours with absolutely no trouble at all no adding fuel or anything so let's have a look at the way this guy's set up it has a thermometer built into the dome lid that's that's accurate enough to work with you can work solely from that it has a top air vent just like the Weber Kettle and it has three lower air vents positioned around the bottom where you can control the intake of the air it has a side panel access door and in here you can see our lower cooking grate and there's also a water pan slash diffuser and then the charcoal basket in the bottom when we take the lid off we have our top cooking grate so we have two cooking grates in this cooker that are 18 and a half inches in diameter you can cook on one or both so it will hold quite a bit of meat and we can take the lower rack out and then we have access to our water pan the the water pan is a really nice feature in this smoker mine's a little dusty because I've had some red lava brick in there you can use this smoker without water you can use it with water lots of people like to put other things in their water pan as a heat sink some people will use sand and various other devices in there to help stabilize the temperature inside this cooker when you do have a heat sink in there such as water or sand it creates a really really stable cooking environment I like to use water in the pan and the reason I like to use water in the pan is because it not only keeps a moist environment inside this cooker it keeps up it helps keep the temperature down the steam that's created from the water and the pan helps keep your cooker of very solidly in the 225 to 250 temperature range without a lot of work and that pan just lifts right out which gives us access to our charcoal basket and the center chamber you know this this is a fully modular cooker the the main chamber lifts right off as well which leaves us with the base and our charcoal basket we have a ring that sets right on the charcoal grate the whole charcoal and to to use this guy on to light it up you fill that ring up with with charcoal you can use lump or you can use Kingsford briquettes I typically use Kingsford blue briquettes in this device but you fill that basket up and then you'll light up 10 or 12 maybe 15 charcoal briquettes and put them in on top of it to create that slow burn just like we did in the in the Weber Kettle for the ribs so it's very simple to use it all comes apart goes back together very simply with the center chamber on we have our side access door which we can open up during the cook and if you needed to add charcoal which you want you could add it right through here or you can add chunks of smoking wood that door also gives you access to the water pan when everything is cooking and in place you can open up this door and use a watering can if you like to add water directly to your charcoal pan and then everything just sits right back in here together my grates are actually a little a little dirty here I haven't cooked on this guy in a while but as part of our backyard barbecue basics our next cook is going to be a Boston but that we will cook on the weber smokey mountain so that's our overview of this cooker so our next installment of this will I'll show you how to how to light this cooker up how to put a Boston bud or how to prep a Boston butt and how to throw it on there and wait anywhere from 8 to 12 hours or so depending on how big it is until you've got some of the best pulled pork you've had in your life

Channel: Man Cave Meals

Views: 162,677

Rating: 4.75419 out of 5

Keywords: weber, smokey, mountain, smoker, cooker, grill, grilling, smoking, barbecue, bbq, food, how-to, basics, backyard, boston, butt, pulled, pork, low, and, slow, cooking, cook, recipe

Id: 36T1msLZcpU

Length: 6min 37sec (397 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2012