Yes, a smoker can absolutely run unattended overnight — I gave up babysitting mine a long time ago, and it’s held up through brisket cooks, pork butt cooks, and even genuinely cold weather. This particular smoke was a fairly typical overnight run, except for one thing: it was 19°F outside, cold even for Middle Tennessee,…

Most people automatically pull a pork butt after smoking it. I don’t always. I cook it to the same finished temperature I would for pulling, and I rest it the same way. But sometimes, after one additional step, I’ll slice it instead — and for sandwiches or serving guests, I actually prefer it that way….

This cook had some extra weight to it: it was the first smoke on a replacement 22″ Weber Smokey Mountain, bought after a garage fire took out my previous smokers a few years earlier. I’d been watching Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for months — during the pandemic, even used WSMs were hard to find —…

I finally found the time to try to perfect hanging ribs on my 22″ Weber Smokey Mountain.  Once again ribs were on sale at my local Sprouts and I purchased two racks for $7 each.  To prepare the ribs,  you want to remove the membrane from the back of the racks. This take a little…

Hanging ribs turns a Weber Smokey Mountain into something closer to a pit-barrel-style cooker: both grates and the water pan come out, and the ribs hang directly over the hot coals instead, with the drippings hitting the coals and feeding back into the smoke. It took me a few attempts to really dial this in…

I decided to smoke some ribs on a fine spring day — low 60s, no rain in the forecast. I fired up my 22″ Weber Smokey Mountain for three racks of baby back ribs, picked up in a 3-pack from my local GFS for around $8 a rack. I used a Weber-branded rub after removing…

I’ve only tried smoking pork belly once before, and that time I went the burnt ends route with mixed results. This time, I wanted to try something simpler — just a standard smoked pork belly, no cubing, no glaze. I picked up a skinless pork belly from Sam’s, about 4 pounds for under $15. I…

I decided to try pork belly burnt ends since I was finally able to find some to work with — Sam’s had started carrying uncured pork belly, and at under $15, the price made it an easy, low-risk experiment.    The recipe I was following called for cubing it into 2″x2″ chunks, since they shrink…

My typical go-to cook on Mother’s Day is ribs. One year my wife headed to California to spend time with our daughter, but the tradition continued anyway — just me, the smoker, and a rack done the way I always do it: the 3-2-1 method. I picked up a rack at $2.88/lb, around $8 total….