Grill Maestro

This tip is helpful for those of us who are novices to smoking and aren’t very good at gauging how much charcoal to burn to hit the sweet temperature spot. The tip is to keep a second grill ready on the side so that you can light additional charcoal without disturbing the peace that you have in your smoker.

A few weeks ago, I started smoking up some pork tenderloin and a rack of pork back ribs. Everything was going great except the temperature was too low. Two months ago, the temperature was too hot, so I used fewer coals and missed the mark again. I tried opening up more air vents and doing all the other tricks to make the coals burn hotter to no avail. Then I threw a few coals into a squat little Weber I had sitting around, splashed on some lighter fluid, and lit it. After about ten minutes and the coals were ashy, I just picked them up and moved them into the Smokey Mountain to juice up the temperature and they did the trick.

Why the secondary grill? I didn’t want to put the unlit, cold coals directly into the Smokey Mountain because it wasn’t hot enough. Also, the coals had a little bit of lighter fluid on them so if I lit them inside the smoker, that nasty lighter fluid flavor would be imparted on my meat… that’s bad.

So, if you have a second grill and you were thinking about tossing it, consider keeping it around just in case!