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Pork chop on stick is good but when you inject cheese into the mix then....well!

So today is a nice cool day here in OKC and after Jerri smoked cheese right after Thanksgiving and my ne'er do well Brother gigged me to smoke some cheese for him, I decided to do some smoked Tillamok Medium Cheddar Cheese today in TheBeast. This is my first attempt at smoking cheese in the belly of TheBeast, so we're into unknown territory. So, we shall see what we shall see. Open up both manifold wide open to get plenty of airflow to make certain the A-Maz-N-Tube Smoker performs as designed. Here's a pic of the A-Maz-N-Tube 6" smoker resting on my lower grate in the beast. It's been lit and has been burning for 10 minutes. Blew out the fire as per instructions and it's now smoking away. We're using hickory pellets today for our smoke component. Here is the Tillamok Cheddar cut into slabs for better smoke adsorption. I used a veggie tray since the holes will allow for good smoke contact on all sides of the cheddar slabs. You probably can't tell from the picture, but I have the upper cooking grate to get the cheese high in the dome of TheBeast. The upper cooking grate is sitting on the main grate which is above the lower grate. So we have the lower grate holding the Tube Smoker, the main grate, and the upper cooking grate holding the cheese for smoking. Here's a picture of the top vent. I've opened this more for this smoke than it's ever been open for a cook, even high temp pizza cooks. The reason for this is that Tube Smokers are notorious for not staying lit in kamado cookers. This isn't going to happen to me today! TheBeast's top vent is 3 full turns open at this point! If you look right under the top vent in the lower right hand quadrant you can see the gasket. Here is the cheese after 2 hours on smoke. The cheese doesn't look as if it has adsorbed much smoke, but believe me it has! You should have been in the kitchen 5 minutes after I brought it in .... smelled like a BBQ joint! Go figure! After a trip to the Food Saver, here's what you get ... Note that Pete The Pink Salt Pig approves! Also note that I've put the date I smoked this cheese on the bag. It'll be ready for consumption in 3 weeks, just in time for Xmas hors d'oeuvres! The reason the bag is so dadgummed crinkled is because I got distracted by Skippy, the Sous Chef cat! I"ll let y'all know in 3 weeks how this turns out!