Sous vide chuck roast and the smoker

[juice]

Best smoked short ribs I’ve ever made. Twirled on the fork like spaghetti. Very easily pulled or served as sliced beef.

It’s just crazy.

[LeCheffre]

Short ribs at 133x72h is one of the things I tell folks to get Sous Vide for. For braised texture, it’s faster to just braise, and easier.

[CFLBob]

What’s the texture like with 133x72? These were very tender.

[LeCheffre]

ChefSteps

Like nothing else. Medium rare, steaks, but braise tender. There’s no way but Sous Vide to get them there.

[Maried]

I have a smoker - an electric Masterbuilt - but I have never been satisfied with the results. I recently made an indoor smoker - my big canning pot, metal steamer rack, putting about 1/2 cup traeger pellets on a piece of foil in the center. Place meat on the steamer, put lid on, and cook on high or medium - smoke will quickly form - for about 45 mins. Cover lid with a cloth and turn on vent fan, and let cool covered so you don’t fill the room with smoke. Works great - better than my $300 Masterbuilt. I tried this with raw chicken thighs and they turned out really smokey and cooked through - next I want to try babybacks after sous vide.

[CFLBob]

I have a Masterbuilt, too, the “Mark 1 digital” model with the control panel in the top center along the back. (There are models with panel center of the front) With the exception of always being cooler in the chamber than the sensor says, it smokes things just fine. I have a two channel thermometer and use one probe to track the temperature next to the meat. I added the external smoke box for cold smoking cheese, salmon or anything that needs temperatures below what gets the chips to smoke inside the smoker. The system does what it’s supposed to.

Electrics don’t usually give a smoke ring, but I’ve read there may be ways to fake that. Haven’t tried it yet.

I’m considering replacing it but don’t quite know with what make/model. Your canning pot sounds like an interesting idea. I suspect your vent fan must be better than mine to not allow too much smoke into the house.

[Bellyman]

We just tried out a combination of sous vide and the smoker! My step-son has a Masterbuilt smoker so we figured we had to just try and see so here’s what we did.

I put about a nice fatty 3 or so pound chuck roast in the refrigerator overnight with a dry rub on it. Then, the next morning, we stuck it into the sous vide, 139 degrees. It sat in the sous vide until about 54 hours later and then we got it out, dried it off, and stuck it in the smoker with some pecan chips at 180 degrees. It stayed in the smoker for about 2.5 hours.

The outside got a bit of a bark on it, not terribly thick. And the very outside did dry out a bit, but that didn’t go very deep, really, not more than maybe 1/8". It was still very juicy on the inside, still just a little on the pink side but even the fat was oh so tender.

I think it’s one of the best we’ve done so far. Seriously, it was REALLY good!

Cooked up some roasted brussels sprouts to go with and had a little keto dessert for a happy ending. We eat good.

We have another roast in the sous vide now that got a brine before going in. My step-son wanted to try out his new sous vide… I think we’ve started something .

[LeCheffre]

Electric smokers do not produce the full range of smoke flavor. It’s just inherent to the method. No full combustion, less smoke flavor.

[Bellyman]

LeCheffre, do you have a type of smoker that you believe would add a fuller range of smoke flavor? I don’t have one yet but am definitely interested in the good and bad about different types of smokers. For the ones that aren’t electric, is temperature regulation an issue? Or doesn’t that even matter for our purposes (when combined with the sous vide)?

[Maried]

I have a good vent fan but a little smoke does escape (towel helps and I weight down the lid with a cast iron pan) but it really smells good and smell gone in an hour or so - like when we use our wood burning fireplace. Your Masterbuilt is much fancier than mine. My son has an amazing combo smoker and grill that he traded his Masterbuilt for - nice smoke ring and then he finishes on grill; he swears by it. I have to check with him about the brand, will post back.

[Maried]

Camp Chef Pellet Smoker and Grill

[CFLBob]

Camp Chef Pellet Smoker and Grill

Thanks, Marie. I don’t know how the brands compare, but the pellet smoker/grill combos are in my list. I’ve looked at the Camp Chef before. I’ve been looking at three options…

The easiest upgrade to the Masterbuilt electrics to produce smoke rings and the flavor @LeCheffre talks about is to burn wood in it. There are products from a place called Amazen, that are talked about very favorably on some barbecue forums I read. It’s a maze or tube that you burn pellets in.
https://www.amazenproducts.com/

The fans say they burn continually through the maze. The detractors say they burn out too easily and you spend all your time messing with the pellets and re-lighting them. Or “just microwave the pellets before you try to light them”.

I like the idea of having a grill available - my old grill rusted out this past spring - so I’ve been looking at the Traegers (friends have them), and there are several brands that feed pellets with an auger like that. Masterbuilt even makes a pellet grill.

Masterbuilt Sportsman Elite XL Pellet Smoker

The other way of going is to get a grill that can also be used as a smoker. The Weber kettle grills seem the highest rated year after year. A place called Adrenaline Barbecue makes some trays that convert a Weber grill to a smoker:
https://abcbarbecue.com/product-category/slow-n-sear/

There’s one version of the Weber that comes with their own version of the Adrenaline Barbecue Slow n’ Sear. Or something like it.

Decisions, decisions.

[LeCheffre]

I have an Amazen Tube, which I find works reasonably well, but it can be a bit tricky to keep lit in a dedicated smoker, due to the lowish oxygen level. I also have a Grilla Grills Original Grilla, which is a pellet cooker, that I use for most of my cooks nowadays. I live in a condo, where between the city regulations for what you can have on a wood deck and the condo insurance requirements, I was limited to gas or electric. No one has challenged me on the idea that the Grilla is an electric, as it, like all pellet cookers has a plug to drive the augur and to keep the burn pot burning. So, my argument to anyone who asks is that it’s very much like a Masterbuilt electric, as it plugs to the wall and it burns compressed sawdust. Oh yeah, and there is nothing like an open flame.

I know the guy behind Adrenaline BBQ. That thing is both so simple it’s amazing Weber didn’t just build the grill with it in the first place and so well built, it’s not that surprising. Weber sells some baskets and bins for charcoal in the kettle, but it’s really not the same as the Slow N Sear. Good for slow, not as great for sear.

[LeCheffre]

This really isn’t a question of belief. It’s a question of science. The wood in an electric smoker never reaches full combustion, so you don’t get to the point where the best aromatic gasses come out of the wood. That’s in the 650-700* range in the wood… the same reason why you will never get a smoke ring in an electric smoker without using prague powder to cheat it is the same reason why folks feel their electrics don’t produce the same rounded and complex flavor that folks get from charcoal, wood, gas or pellets).

What You Need to Know About Wood, Smoke, And Combustion

I run one of these:

But I also run chunks of wood on the flavorizer bars of my Weber Genesis 330 and a tube of pellets.

Propane smokers work really well, also. For ease of use, I like my pellet grill, but my brother and I made some very tasty ribs on his cheap propane smoker.

Electric grills are great for cold smoking, for fish, nuts, cheeses, anything where you want to keep humidity high and don’t really need good bark.

[CFLBob]

Now I’m more confused than I was before.

They say electric heaters don’t get hot enough to reach this 650-700 range they recommend for certain compounds, but those compounds are going somewhere. When I empty out the smoker after a meal, it’s not like there’s pieces wood in the tray, unless I turn it off before the chips have stopped smoking. There’s just a fine white dust where the chips used to be. That means everything that was in the wood other than that ash went somewhere and I always assumed they went up into the smoker.

Likewise, I have the external smoker for cold smoking. If I open that up before the chips have turned to ash, they catch fire. Every 1 to 1-1/2 hours, I open it to break up clots of chips that form from the resins in the chips getting out, and the chips catch fire. That means the only thing keeping them from igniting all the rest of the time is absence of enough air.

I thought, from reading elsewhere, that the issue with getting a smoke ring in the electric smoker was the lower quantity of smoke not lower quality of smoke. I have gotten a pink smoke ring on pork shoulders for making pulled pork in my Masterbuilt electric but it isn’t consistent. I’ve always gotten a good thick bark on pork shoulders. The only issues I’ve been having with not enough bark started up with my sous vide experiments.

[LeCheffre]

Quality. It’s quality of combustion.

[Bellyman]

Thanks LaCheffre,

I hope the way I asked my question wasn’t offensive with using the word “believe”. Might have been a less than great selection of words. Sorry if it came across in a bit of an odd way. Not intended…

[daddyoh]

I use an amazen smoke tube and a wedgie with my masterbuilt smoker. It is the only way to go.

[Maried]

What’s a smoke tube and wedgie? Thanks!

[Maried]

I suspected as much. If I want good quality of smoke I have to leave it on high or near high and it literally bakes my meat so can’t leave it for hours and hours. If I turn it down to say 225° it stops smoking.