tony b

Same here. A bag goes a long way!

My first thought is that your charcoal has gotten damp somehow and isn't catching except under direct flame. As C6Bill said, don't chase the temps around. The beauty of the KK is the "set it and forget it" nature of the dampers. Fill the basket, light one spot, set your dampers for the target temp and walk away. Your experience with the 50F degree difference between dome and grate initially is true to form, and as you noted, it balances out as the cook progresses. The basket splitter is typically only used when you want two-zone heat, like doing a slow roast on the cooler side, followed by a reverse sear on the direct heat side. Or, using the rotisserie so the meat rotates in/out of the direct heat zone. While you can use the splitter arrangement to do a long low & slow cook (butts, briskets, etc.), I prefer the full basket setup with the foil barrier, as C6Bill described.

I prefer pellets, as I have struggled in the past with keeping chips lit. That said, get good quality pellets that don't have a lot of binders in them. I like Lumberjack. Home of the Real BBQ Wood Pellets - BBQ Lumber Jack – Lumber Jack Grilling Pellets

That sandwich is MONEY! 🤑

Use less fuel. Just a few coals will do for a cold smoke of salmon. Plan B - heat soak the KK at the desired temperature for an hour, kill the fire, then put the salmon on with the smoker going.

On of our IA breweries is named "No Coast"!! LOL I wish that I had a good seafood market here. Some restaurants get decent stuff. We do have a truck that comes up from Galveston every few weeks in the nicer months that has really good, fresh shrimp, crab meat and whole red snapper. They also have oysters and crawfish, but never live/in the shell - too bulky.

Love stuffies, but rarely make them myself. Good job on that turkey boob! 😁

Just don't leave the lid up for too long with that kind of heat; you'll damage the gaskets. Better to just open the top vent all the way and let'er rip that way.

After all, @DennisLinkletter is a genius! (Yes, I know that I'm milking it, but it's fun nonetheless!)

They are also very easy to cleave the longer ones - just hit 2 of them together and one of them will just split in two, very cleanly.

I'm curious, too, Robert? The imbedded link doesn't go anywhere?

Yep, Dennis is a genius! The upper grate has always been dual purpose as the "sear grate."

👍 👍

Can't wait for your review.

Very Cool!

Or build a Syzygies cast iron smoker pot. The wood chunks inside it just smolder and don't catch fire, so there's no noticeable heat increase and the wood smolders for a long time.

Two tips on using the Guru probe to monitor grate temps - first, don't clip the probe directly to the grate - you're getting heat condution from the rods and aren't measuring true air temperature. I use an old wine cork with a screw in it to clip the alligator clip to. I trim the cork on the bottom to snuggly fit between the grate rods. The second tip - akin to what @wrandyr noted, you don't want the probe too close to the meat. A couple of grate rods away (several inches) is sufficient to measure the air temperature around the meat without worrying about being "in the shadow." For the MEATER probe, don't insert it beyond the scribed line on the probe. Again, otherwise the air probe at the tip could be "shadowed" by the meat. Another, unrelated tip about MEATER probes - while they're absolutely perfect for doing rotisserie cooks, be careful to insert the probe as close to parallel to the rotation as you can, preferably in the end of the meat. Why, you might ask? Well, I actually had this happen to me on a rotisserie cook where I stuck the probe in perpendicular to the meat surface. When it rotated, juices ran down the probe shaft and were getting cooked onto the tip of the probe. I only noticed it when the MEATER app warned me of a temperature drop. When I went out to check things, I noticed that there was a big blob of crusted material on the end of the probe, which was effectively insulation. When I wiped that off, the temperature reading went back to "normal."

Definitely a Johnson POSK. With that much damage, especially the broken top vent, I have to 2nd @5698k, it may be beyond repair, I'm afraid.

Very nice setup! WOW that's a lot of steps to carry even a TT 22" KK up! Hope you tipped those movers well!

As @C6Bill said, pictures would help, especially if you have an old R Johnson KK (aka POSK). If that's what you own, then shedding tiles is just par for the course. It may or may not be repairable. I owned one myself and the collar for the top hat just crumbled. They just weren't very well made, unlike Dennis' KKs, which are built like tanks!

First guess is an obvious one - the smoke tube into the KK was blocked by one of the wood chunks. Did you have it screen side up or down?

@Saucier - as far as I know, Dennis has always had a Guru port in his KKs, at least the bigger ones.

I have an older 23 KK and have no issues with using the cold smoker tube inserted directly into the BBQ Guru port. While I sometimes think that it would be nice to run the Guru and cold smoker at the same time, I really haven't thought that my cooks suffered as a result of only using the cold smoker solo.