7 Huge Mistakes You Make On a Pellet Smoker

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We’ll be counting down the seven biggest mistakes that are made with a pellet smoker slash grill. And the reason I say slash grill is this is actually an eight one.

Good morning. Y’all in this video, I’m gonna show you the seven biggest mistakes made while using a pellet smoker slash grill.

There I’m Don with Southern Backyard Cooking and in this video, we’ll be counting down the seven biggest mistakes that are made with a pellet smoker slash grill. And the reason I say slash grill is this is actually an eight one. It’ll do the smoking grilling, searing everything.

If you do like my video, please make sure you subscribe by entering the bill. This will get you notifications. And every time I have a new post and it’s all for the free mistake, number seven, not storing your pellets in a watertight container, whether it’s a five-gallon drum with a lid that has a seal on it, or the way I prefer in one-gallon Ziploc bags, the one-gallon Ziploc bags gives you about three and a half pounds of pellets per bag. And that will last you summer between four and six hours, depending on what temperature you’re cooking or smoking at.

Moving on now to mistake. Number six, it’s wrapping the drip plate in aluminum full for easy cleaning.

Now I’ve already pulled out my racks and I’m gonna put on gloves because as it is very nasty and pull out the drip tray. And as you can see, it’s pretty nasty, pretty dirty. So, we just want by wrapping it. Okay.

As you can see, I’ve wrapped this one and because it is so when I take it and take it off, it presents all that dirt from getting on there. And I just throw it right there in the trash can. Now I’m gonna rewrap this. All right guys, mistake number five is to make sure you clean the drip track.

 What this does is it will prevent fires, cuz grease will build up into that?

So I am cleaning the grease, the grease outta here, and basically I just wanna wipe it out. Okay.

Mistake number four is people not cleaning the Ash pot, the Ash pot. It is where all the ashes come from, all the pellets when they burn up. All right. So the first thing I gotta have to do is take the cover off Ash pot.

This comes right up and you see how the ashes are down there as well as all around. So what I’m gonna do is I gotta shop back here and I’m gonna vacuum them.

All right. So, what I did was vacuum all that out. One of the biggest things, if we don’t vacuum that tube, the Ash pot out is a lot of times, especially after a little bit builds up in there, it will not actually burn.

So you won’t get any smoke and you won’t get any heat. That’s why this is so critical to do. If you’re only doing it for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, you might be able to go every second or third time. But if you’re doing a long smoke, you need to do it before every single time.

All right, mistake number three, that is to clean the thermostat. You really need to do this every single time between your cooks to make sure that the reading that the auger sends the thermostat sends is correct. So you’ll get the right temperature inside.

All right. So all I’m gonna do is take a wipe, the thermostat probe, and that’s all you need to do every single time after cooks. All right, mistake, number two that most people make is when cooking do not place any air food in the first inch from the front and the rear. Okay?

So as you can see, there’s a gap about an inch and back in the back about an inch and a half, we don’t want any of our food exposed in this area because that’s gonna be hotter. It’s not gonna be deflected by our splash plate. So that will be hotter and it will overcook possibly burn. Our countdown is down to number one.

The biggest mistake P people make when cooking on a smoker or a grill is that is by cooking by time instead of by temperature. So whether you use a stick thermometer, that’ll go right in and give us a digital one.

It’s digital. So it’ll give us an instant-read. Or my favorite is wireless. This particular wireless model has two probes. So I can put it in two different pieces of meat. And this is my remote receiver.

So I can be inside the house or wherever. And I can see the temperature, the internal temperature is of the meats that I am cooking. This is more critical than anything else.

Most people cook by time. And then they wonder why it’s not cooked to the temperature that they like. For example, a filet being medium, rare versus being medium. I hope you enjoyed my video today. I hope these seven tips really helped you out.

Editor’s Choice: Top-list grills under $300-$1,000

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