As I'm getting more familiar with my smokette, a question comes to mind based on some of the cooking duration feedback here on this forum. While I know that the smokette is quite capable of handling up to 20 lbs, I can't help but get the feeling like there's an 'optimal' weight range for yielding the best results. For example, a forum subscriber earlier mentioned that a real small brisket could come up to temperature right away, but wouldn't be as tender as a larger cut that's slowly cooked over time. So for a newbie, I'm curious to hear if any of the experience smokette owners have a general rule for a minimum sized cut.
For example, I've seen beef briskette at the grocer as small as a couple of pounds. I've also seen small pork shoulders (blade roasts) as small as 2.4 pounds. I understand grocers tend to cut some of the traditionally large roasts into smaller sizes to meet consumer demand. And while these cuts will all 'cook' in the smokette, I would have to believe that the larger cuts tend to be more ideal for a variety of reasons. But what's ideal? That's my question...
Is this an invalid assumption? If I'm correct on this line of thinking, I'd like to hear from some experienced smokette owners on what they feel their threshold size would be... And specifically, I'm most interested in the following - Pork shoulder, beef briskette, and most importantly, prime rib.
I'm planning to cook a prime rib using stuart's approach and would like to test things out with a small prime rub (I believe it would be called the 'first cut' which is about three ribs if I'm recall correctly).
Thanks in advance to your responses!
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