At the risk of displaying my own stupidity, I thought I’d go ahead and post this for the benefit of anyone else who might be as cranially challenged as me. After several successful smokes on my several-months old Amerique, I invited family and friends over for some Memorial Day BBQ. Before firing up, I noticed for the first time that the rack rails were adjustable, so I raised them to the higher setting and removed the very top rack so that I’d have more room for my rib rack on the new top shelf. The brisket flat and turkey roast went to the center grill (I use the foil pan method – don’t judge me), and after a few hours, added a few racks of ribs to the top grill and thought maybe I’d add an empty foil pan to the bottom rack to catch drippings and make for an easier clean-up.
The first odd thing I noticed was that my oven temperature began spiking much more than normal – usually the Americue dials into 225 and only varies a degree or two for the duration. Now it was rising to 235 before settling back down to 225. I attributed it to a higher amount of meat than normal. Next, my brisket seemed to plateau at 150 – much lower than I had ever seen - and sat there for several hours. After still sitting there four hours later, and at a total time of eight hours (when my flats are normally done) I knew something was up. Dropping my digital thermometer into the oven, I was registering 190 versus my Amerique reading of 225+. Dialing up to 250 brought the Amerique oven indicator to over 260, but my digital thermometer still barely moved above 200.
Finally, I served up the (luckily) perfect Big Green Egg chicken wings and stuffed Italian sausage, the turkey roast, the edible but undercooked ribs, and continued to torture/experiment on the brisket (which was ultimately tossed without so much as a single knife cut). Fortunately, the beer had served its purpose and the guests were fully satiated with my half-ass meal.
So a post-mortem during a soberer next morning revealed this: In adjusting the rack rail location, I had brought the lower rack to a few millimeters above the oven temperature probe in the back of the smoker. I then added a rib drip tray to that lower rack. It was wide enough to catch any drippings from the whole ribs, and also deep enough that there was barely a half inch of clearance around its edges in the oven. So I had inadvertently created a cold smoke baffle. The heat was trapped below the lower shelf (and foil pan that sat on it), and the oven temperature probe was within that chamber. The heating element quickly rose to, and surpassed, my target temp in that small space (causing the indicator spikes), and all that heat only slowly rose into the cooking chamber (causing the huge difference between the Amerique reading by the heating element and the manual reading in the chamber above. The Amerique had thought it was holding a temperature of 225 or more, while my food sat in a cooking chamber at a frosty 190.
I had violated my cardinal rule when cooking for outsiders – NEVER DO ANYTHING YOU HAVEN”T SUCCESSFULLY DONE BEFORE – by adding the drip pan and changing the rail height. There are always enough odd variances from tried and true methods to keep things interesting enough. Anyway, I thought I’d throw this into the forum for the benefit of any future fool that creates the same problem with bizarre oven temps. Happy smoking!
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