Let’s See What This Reverse Flow Does.

This is the first time cooking anything in the Oklahoma Joe’s Highland Offset Reverse Flow Smoker and BBQ.

I was given a couple of 18 inch Rainbow Trout caught last night. At Safeway we bought 10 pounds of pork bone-in sirloin steaks for $10 and a ¾ pound beef New York strip for $6.

I harvested a 5 gallon bucket of dry dead mesquite wood from the yard.

I started the fire with my electric starter in the offset fire box. It worked really well. I made sure the handle was not above the flames and to the side.

At 5:40 PM the meat was on. I sprinkled my 3 equal parts black pepper, onion powder and garlic powder on the beef and pork steaks. I needed to smoke the fish so I was trying something new. 300*F smoking. I used the Scientific Kentucky windage that saw when I seasoned the smoker the other day. I put mostly twigs in the offset to get a lot of heat and smoke fast. 20 minutes into the smoke the smoker temperature was 300*F and the offset needed some bigger pieces of wood to stabilize the heat. I left the smoke stack vent all the way open and regulated air flow at the intake vent.

My 30 year old wood tending rebar never needed a hook on it before, but it does now. I welded a piece of horseshoe on it to hang it on the smoker while I was waiting.

To get a constant temperature you’ll need to not open the firebox door or the smoker door. You’ll have to go on the thermometer on the lid and one in the meat and rely on times from previous successful smokes. If you’re doing it for the first time use the best data that you can find for the type of food you’re smoking. Opening a door can let so much heat out that it takes 10 minutes to recover. You will have to add more wood during the smoke when you see the thermometer needle going down. If you added too much wood close the vents part way to lessen the oxygen. This may put a lot of extra smoke into the chamber, so watch the wood.

At 6:20 I pulled the trout and the beef steak. Because the steak is smoked using the offset it doesn’t look like your standard BBQ’d steak. It is basically a baked smoked steak medium rare all the way through. There was no bark like you get from BBQ grilling.

I should have oiled the grills where the trout what put. The skin glued itself to the grill and was a pain to get it off. The trout was perfect, tender and juicy.

At 7:00 PM we pulled the pork steaks after 1 hour and 20 minutes at 300*F of smoking baking. It was strange to see red on the outside of the meat with an internal temperature of 196*F. I have seen this with smoking at lower temps like on a ham in a low oxygen environment. After resting for a half hour the color changed to brown.

The pork will be made into other dishes like green chili (verde carnitas). My goal was to smoke infuse the meat.