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Awesome cook, Steve.

Scallops and Halibut with an asparagus sauce on the EVO.

As we all know every species has it's own unique flavor profile, oak tastes much different than mesquite. I'm surprised nobody mentions these charcoals flavor. Is it strong like mesquite or light like apple? My problem here in Indonesia before I started making my own charcoal was not knowing what it was going to taste like because it was mixed or species unknown. Mystery charcoal makes it more difficult to get repeatable consistent results. If I was going to smoke a chicken with applewood, I would not want to use mesquite because you would never taste the apple. The reason I fell in love with the coffee char was because of how it tastes.. there are many much more dense woods here but I also personally refuse to cut trees to make charcoal. There are great mangrove charcoals but I feel you are either part of the problem or working on the solution. The coffee trees are cut every 15 years because their yields go down. The tamarind charcoal I buy is only trimmed branches, and of course, no trees are cut to make the coconut shell char. Just saying

Looks delicious

All, thanks for your feedback, next time I’ll do a better job of an even fire across the width of the grill and will plan on setting up more of an “indirect” cook with foil or pans etc. I was out pontooning with a bunch of friends and had my son light the grill and while he lit it in 3 spots across the width it ended up not an being an even fire...I could of cleaned it up a bit etc but after pontooning.................... was just in a bit of a hurry...using the craddle for the first time......... I think you get my drift!!! Best, Paul

Didn't say it was likely, just that it *could* be the case. Far more likely is that I keep both and add a PK for portability.

Oak and hickory are best used sparingly, IMO. Like many, I started my smoking "career" not knowing any better and over-smoking everything with oak and hickory. Less is more. Coffee lump charcoal is far and away my favorite. The flavor it imparts is subtle, but sublime. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Just an FYI, I have tried oak as a smoke wood and it was nasty. I had some very large limbs that had to be trimmed from the huge oak tree behind my house. So I sawed them up and let them dry out in the shop for a year or two.....yuck...wasted effort. Screw it, cut me some good tasting trees down....LOL. Though the coffee charcoal does sound very interesting. I think you started doing it right about the time I had to stop cooking for a while. Maybe one day I'll have to give it a try. I still have two boxes of your CEL around here too.

Cooking direct.. the outside area where the firebox is without charcoal will never have the same heat as the areas directly above charcoal. The uniform heat comes into play when you cook indirectly and use more of the heat from the walls. I remember seeing someone placing a strip of foil dead center over their charcoal to reduce the heat in the center.. I think they even put a bunch of holes in it to distribute the heat the way they wanted it.

So I thought I would post a couple of picture of the 3 chickens in the 32” rotisserie craddle. As Dennis said these fit nicely in the cradle. These were about 5.0 to 5.5 lbs each. Cooked them with the Huli Huli recipe from the Meathead cookbook. A couple of other comments related to this thread. I ordered and received the CyberQ Cloud this last week. I did one experiment cook for bratwurst and really only used the Pit probe just to control the temperature and it went great. When making the rotisserie chickens I also tried to use it hear and had some problems getting to temperature.....I think this is likely operative error and my learning curve. I also received my cold KK smoker on Friday. Since we had company all weekend I just opened the box today and did a trial run of smoking only...no food. Based on some other threads related to the cold smoker I put some cherry wood pellets up to about the vent holes...I then soaked a small handful of apple pellets in Stroh Rum (very strong stuff) hit it with the lighter.....let it go about 3-5 minutes....set the pump air on high...let it go another few minutes and then added more pellets to the hopper.....it worked like a charm. Think I’m going to make a Pastrami next weekend and tryout the CyberQ and cold smoker at the same time!!!

Leftovers today.