The amazing egg and stoker

I love my stoker. I also love my Egg. I love smoking food. I am constantly amazed at those three things when put together.

I cooked for the Daughters Birthday Bash (see below) and the food was amazing. Just for shits and giggles, I decided to see how long the Egg would run on the one load of fuel. My last attempt at this was 22 hours. It began like this...

I lit the Egg on Saturday afternoon at 4:30 with a full load (up to the fire ring) of lump ( about 1/2 a bad of lump). I put the food on and 6:00 pm. The stoker was running the egg at 220. All was well until I tried to run Stoker Log, a great program from a forum user. It is windows based and somehow the Stoker spiked the heat to 300. This is bad in BBQ. I finally had to reset the stoker and all was well.
The food was done Sunday morning at 10:00 am, earlier than I thought. I just kept the Stoker going, at 220 and left it alone. Then the idea of how long it would burn came to me, and also the idea of how low it would go. So I set it at 200 and left it alone. I tracked its progress all day and into the night. By 10:00 it was struggling, with the fan running. an hour later the temp kept dropping. i thought it was done. I opened the lid and saw so much ash had collected that it was clogged up. So I moved the wood around, and unplugged the holes, and it jumped right back up to 200.

This lasted until around 1:00 am, Monday morning. Yes, Monday. At this point, the temp was falling fast. So I just shut it off. All during this, the outside temp was 40 and dropping. When I shut the egg down it was 36 degrees outside.
The picture you see is the amount of wood left after the egg shut down.

Amazing. Roughly 31 hours of constant cooking temps, on one load of wood. I can't imagine a better fuel/fire ratio.

Wow.

Daughters Big Party!

This weekend my little girl turned 4. In celebration of that event, we had a small family gathering. I made up some Pulled Pork, some gourmet potato salad, and some baked beans. It was a great party, and the food was amazing. A friend brought some sauces he made, which were a huge hit. More on that later. Enjoy the food.

The stink, stank, stunk...

For some reason, i didn't do any smoking over the Nov-Dec months. Where I live there is lots moisture in the air, causing the dreaded mold and rust. I opened my Egg, and it was full of it. So I did what the good folks over at the egg forum suggested: Go nuclear. That means 500-600 degrees. I did this and the egg was clean of all moldy substances.

The biggest issue was the stink. The was a bad creosol smell when I would light the egg. It wouldn't burn off. So I again asked and found my nuclear wasn't long enough. So I opened the egg wide and man after about an hour, the smell was gone. I poot all the egg equipment in it and cooked those two!

I did find one big issue that needs to be addressed. The metal top of the egg is cast iron. Sadly, I did not know this and rust showed up. I followed the advice of the forum (see the pattern) and gave it the cast iron pan treatment. This meant rubbing it down with oil and giving it a good cook. That worked wonders.

The big birthday bash party is this weekend, so I have to get the egg all cleaned up for cooking!

Some catering pics.

I did some food for a friend last year, as he was having a party and heard good things about my BBQ. I cooked up a bunch of ribs and some pulled pork. They turned out great. Everyone loved them.

Enjoy.

Where has the time gone?

Sorry for the lack of updates. I cooked quite a bit at the end of the summer, then had to stop due to my Mom getting hurt. So it has been quiet except for the occasional smoke. I will post some pics when i get them. I will have a big smoke in the next few weeks for my baby girls 4th Birthday. She is the helper you see in the pic. I have been visiting the sites and getting back up to speed on the 'Que, so look for more updates as we go on!