Greetings gang!
I want to throw this out to get some ideas from those of you that have experienced or solved this issue.
Most of you know we cook with two FE's on the back of our trailer. We only fire up one on Friday. We cook two butts on the top shelf and a brisket (big) on each of the next two shelves, fat side down. My theory is that the butts will baste the brisket below, and that brisket will baste the next one. Well, that works fine, but the bark on the briskets is very bad. In fact, some cooks it can be accidently scraped off if we're not careful. We foil the briskets when they look good, which is usually at about 170 degrees. Our brisket rub has very little sugar in it. The butts have awesome bark. Although we us a different rub, it also has very little sugar. I have given up spraying anything during the cook. I thought that caused the problem. While I see no difference in the moisture of the product, spraying is not what is giving me the bad bark issue.
We've considered doing things different in two ways. One, we thought about moving the butts down two shelves and cooking the briskets on the top two shelves. Our concern is that now the bark on the butts will be bad. Two, we're thinking about firing up the second FE on Friday and cooking the butts in one and briskets in the other. That seems wasteful because I don't know what I'd do with any more than the same two butts we cook, so one cooker would have just two butts in it while the other cooker would have the two briskets. A side note: We used to battle a moisture issue with the briskets. Cooking this way has solved that, but created this new problem.
I don't know if I've given you enough info, but I'd sure appreciate your input. Thnx!
Rod
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