Got some 4th Smoker Photos

The 4th went great!

Early in the morning, we fired up our Weber Performer, laying it out in indirect heat mode as we were planning to smoke two racks of pork ribs and four thick-cut pork chops. I don't know about most people, but we've gotten into the habit of taking our soaked wood chips and making small foil packets with them that we place on top of the cooking grill right above the two baskets of hot coals - with 6-8 small holes punched into the tops of the packets to allow the smoke to escape. This way, we get smoke for a longer period of time than we get by just tossing the non-wrapped wet chips directly onto the hot coals - just a quick tip.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, we had lightly rubbed the ribs and the chops down with a blend of salt, garlic powder and black pepper (ground, of course) and let the meat rest overnight. We didn't put our dry rub blend on the meat this time around. We cut the ribs in half and put all four half-racks onto one of those rib racks (We have a collapsible rack, but we're always misplacing the stands so I'm thinking of purchasing a Weber one-piece rack.) and centered the rib holder over the drip/water pan we'd placed between the coal baskets. We put the chops at each end of the rib holder and set our vents to hold the temp at around 250F. (12 cold bricquettes in each basket, with 12 HOT bricquettes on top. Bottom vents closed to about 1/3 open and top vents about 1/4 open works on our Weber.)

Anyway, the smoker packets stopped smoking at about the 90-minute mark and we pulled the ribs and chops at the 2-hour mark. Note the color on the meat! I forgot - and you would have too after tasting the meat! - to take photos of the ribs after I cut them apart, but we saw a solid 1/4" red "Maillard Reaction" rim to the meat so we definitely had a good 'smoke effect'. We had some spicy honey barbecue sauce to dip into, but the ribs were so tasty on their own that I only ate one rib with the sauce!

The two photos attached are of one of the half-racks of ribs and one of two of the smoked chops.

We also tossed 8 "Bubba Burgers" and 8 turkey burger patties onto the Weber after pulling the pork. We had to toss 8 bricquettes into each basket and blow on the coals to get the fresh coals lit. But then after we closed the flip-open parts of the grill back down we just put two more smoker packets over the coals and put the lid down. We flipped the patties after 1/2 hour and left them on for another 1/2 hour and pulled them. As soon as they cooled down enough, we double-bagged them in zip-lock freezer bags. We'll heat-and-eat them throughout the next couple of weeks.