How to Set Up a Weber Kettle for Different Cooking Methods

hey everyone i'm aaron from low and slow basics and today we're going to go through a few different setups in the old weather kettle now we get messages almost every day asking how do i set up a weather for a brisket how do i set it up for chicken wings what if i'm doing pulled pork but today we're going to cover about four different methods that you can use for different cooks like roasts chicken wings low and slow so we'll get started by going through the charcoal basket setup all right so your charcoal baskets great for that sunday roast typically you want them filled up with nice hushed over red hot briquettes and the way you can do that is either get a fire lighter bury them in each basket light them up wait 10-15 minutes and you'll have two baskets full of nice red-hot brick hats ready to go or what you can do is have your fire lighters there light them up you can measure out how many briquettes you're going to use in each basket and then you can use a chimney starter pour them in and they'll be ready to go in about 10 minutes as well or the third option is we'll go over to the gas bbq [Music] if you've got a side burner on your gas bbq and you can light that up this is what i usually do because it's nice quick and easy put your briquettes in there once the bottom layers sort of caught a lot turn your gas off and about five minutes later you've got a nice chimney worth of ashdover briquettes ready to go so this setup you'll get about four maybe five hours of burn time out of these if you do run low or it only lasts about three hours it's going to change depending on if you're using charcoal or brick hats if you've got the cooking grate that flips up you can always just top up with more briquettes that's always handy and then for the roasting setup itself you always want your bottom and top vent wide open and you can always put a drip tray underneath your roast whatever you're cooking chuck veggies in your drip tray all that juice and fat that's dripping down is always going to add a lot of flavor to your veggies and you always want to make sure you get that clean burning smoke before you put your meat on you don't want to taint whatever you're cooking with that dirty smoke so that's pretty much the roasting setup so now we'll move on to our next one all right so in my opinion there's no better way to cook chicken wings than a vortex so this is a set up for high indirect heat you want to fill your vortex up obviously there's no bottom to it we've basically got a pyramid of steel there you can either put your fire light or bury it in there light it up wait till they're nice red hot and ashed over or you can use your chimney starter but you want to be careful because the opening of this is a bit smaller than your charcoal basket so you might want to use some tongs to get them in there nice and safely and then once they're ready to go you basically want to put your cooking grate on and if you want to use some smoking wood you can place it over the top there and then you can basically put your chicken wings in a circle around the vortex nice high indirect heat you're going to get that nice crispy skin you probably get about an hour and a half burn time out of it so when you put your lid on you want both vents open again obviously it's going to draw all the heat out of your vent so with your chicken wings every 10 to 15 minutes you want to be rotating your lid so you get that nice even heat distribution over your wings so so another nice great setup so now we'll move on to something a bit more low and slow all right so now we're going to run through the snake method this is that one where it's perfect for brisket pulled pork or any of them long cooks uh six to 12 hours plus so we'll go ahead and get started on setting up a snake all right so there's our snake set up only took about three and a half minutes to build so pretty quick and that's going to give us about eight to ten hours burn time with that size snake if you wanted longer like 12 hours plus then obviously just build your snake a bit longer you want to build them like dominoes so they're going to fall into each other and that's going to just burn all the way around and then to start it you want about 10 to 12 nice red hot ash dover brick hats put them at the start of the snake stack them up so they're going to burn through you can either do that with your fly lighter but i always like to use my chimney starter for that so i can just pour them straight on in at the start there and then to start it always have your bottom vent and top vent wide open and to monitor your temps if you don't have a temperature gauge on the top of your webber there we'll just chuck our cooking grate on quickly because you're obviously going to be cooking on that if you've got an ink bird or something always chuck it on your grate there to monitor your temps and once you get about to that 150 to 175 degrees fahrenheit range you want to start shutting that bottom vent down always leave that top vent open why do anyway and then give it about 10 to 15 minutes to respond if it is overshot then you want to close it down a bit more or if you've come just under your temperature you want to go to then just open it up a little bit more and then give it another five to ten minutes to sort of respond sort itself out and stabilize off and you always just want to make your adjustments with that bottom vent so like i said if you want to increase your temperature open up your bottom vent you'll get more airflow if you want to bring it down a little bit then either shut it off for a little bit or just have it pretty much just open ever so slightly so that's the weber setup for the snake method so now we'll go through our last setup for the day with the charcoal rails all right so the charcoal rails these are pretty old-school they've gotten rid of them many years ago now with the newer webbers but basically they're like the charcoal baskets but they're a rail so they just slot in like that [Music] and then they're built to obviously hold your charcoal so we'll fill that up right so as you can see you can fit quite a bit more there than what you can into the charcoal basket so you can use this method for low and slow or as a substitute if you don't have charcoal baskets and obviously put your other charcoal rail on the opposite side and build them like your charcoal baskets but you can do low and slow with this you just want to leave enough room for about 10 to 12 prickets again nice red hot put them at the end there and then they're just going to slowly burn through that pile you'll probably get about four to six hours out of that maybe a bit longer and you want to treat it like your snake method set up where you control everything by your bottom vent and monitor it from there so that's a pretty quick and easy one with the charcoal rails like i said you can use it like your charcoal baskets for your roasting but you do fit enough briquettes in there to do your low and slow stuff too so that's our last setup for the day all right so just to recap we talked about the charcoal baskets the vortex method the snake method and the charcoal rails one thing that i forgot to talk about with the snake method obviously if you've got your snake running all the way around the side and you've got your meat over this side for example over the non-lit charcoal once your snake starts burning around that side you don't want your meat directly over that charcoal because it's going to burn the bottom so what you want to do is obviously just rotate your cooking grate so it's back over this side because by the time the snakes burn over here this side would have been burnt out and it's cold again so just rotate your cooking grate so it's never over the direct charcoal or briquettes that you're using all right so make sure that you subscribe to our channel because we're going to be using a heap of them methods and more we've already used quite a few if you've seen some of our previous videos so hit that subscribe button so you get notified when our new videos come out so that's now the end of the video so i hope this has covered some of the techniques that you want to use or you've been thinking about using there's so much more you can do with the webers you can get rotisserie kits you can turn them into basically pizza ovens and there's heaps of other techniques that you can use but this is just a few to start you off on your barbecue journey so i hope you've learned something if you have give us a thumbs up drop a comment as well and if you really liked it feel free to share it with your family and friends or anyone who has questions about the weber setup so we'll leave it at that and we'll see you next time cheers you

Channel: Low n Slow Basics

Views: 785,412

Keywords: how to set up a weber, how to set up a weber kettle, using a weber kettle, using a charcoal bbq, using a kettle bbq, setting up a weber kettle, kettle bbq set up, weber snake method, weber charcoal rails, weber charcoal baskets, weber vortex method, weber set up, weber, kettle bbq, weber grills, set up, setup, bbq, low n slow basics, low and slow basics

Id: 337y4bgOcVI

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021