Looking for advice on new smoker and thermal processing.

[armyguy]

I’ve mentioned in another post where I have my PK100 for sale, that I am upgrading to a much larger smokehouse. It should be here sometime in March so I’m going to run the electrical for it(240V) to the backyard in the meantime. Can’t wait!

So my question is, I ruined my last batch of sausage in the PK100. The batch before was hands down the best batch I’ve ever made or tasted for that matter. I’m not sure why I had issues with this batch. It was only a 15lb batch this time vs 10lb the last time. I did use half pork/half brisket for this batch. The previous batch was all pork. I got a stall at about 135° and couldn’t get the dang temp to go up several hours later. I had two probes in the Pk100 and the set temp was accurate vs the two ambient probes inside the smoker. Long story short, I had to be up at 5am and it was past 1am, so I left them in and went to sleep, thinking they’ll be done in a few more hours when I woke back up. They had already been on like 10 hours at that point. Needless to say, they overshot and fat rendered out by the time I woke up.

I always follow the schedule on the meatgistics video Jonathon did. I also used the water pan with sponges method.

Sorry for the long background story. So all that said, the new smokehouse is a 240V, ~7000 watt beast with built in convection fan as well as humidity controls with water line attachment. Should I be able to bypass the stall with the convection fan and humidity control on this one? If not I’ll be purchasing a Sous Vide and finishing them off that way, I just prefer to be able to finish them in the smoker for what I’ve paid for it.

TIA for any help/feedback.

[Dave in AZ]

armyguy
Congrats on new smoker.
Humidity addition is promising, but temp control is the key. Pk100 shouldn’t have “overshot and got fat out” unless you had temps set high. If you had 160 or so, meat shouldnt exceed that. Being able to set accurate temps 120 to 180 is needed.

Addition of moisture to avoid stall can be hard at low temps below boiling, commercial ovens inject steam. Will be interested to hear how it does!

I like SV finish usually.

[processhead]

armyguy I agree with Dave in AZ comments and would add that in my experience, having greater heating capacity normally can help push you through temperature plateaus or “stalls”.
With the added heating capacity you also need adequate temperature controls that will hold temperature below that which fat rendering can happen.
Stalls can happen anytime there is too much product loaded in a smoker without enough thermal capacity.
Cool/ cold ambient temperatures can make it even worse.

[Jamieson22]

Curious what smoker temp were you running when you went to bed?

[Jonathon]

armyguy If you can afford it a smoker with humidity controls will be a huge benefit to you, it makes an enormous difference. How fatty was the brisket you added? If you added a lot of beef fat then I can see that causing some issues with your cooking time and the finished product.

[armyguy]

processhead

Yeah the PK100 stays rock solid at the set temp once it gets there. I do know it was pretty cold outside that night(in the low 30’s). Smoker was pretty full. I think I had most of the racks full except one. I thought I had recorded the cool with my FireBoard but I can’t see the cook so not sure what happened there. Set temp was 180° to finish with 3 auto sponges in after the first hour of drying.

[armyguy]

Jamieson22

Bumped it to 180 right before I went to sleep.

[armyguy]

Jonathon

I believe just normal. I removed a lot of the fat cap and silver skin so I trimmed it up pretty good. If I saw bits of good fat I threw them in.

The smoker I ordered(Nu-Vu Smoke13) has solid state controls and is supposed to hold temps really accurately from 50°-350°. The only thing I don’t like is that all of the controls, including the temp range are knobs. The temp range on the knob are in 25° increments. The way the humidity works is that it has an adjustment from 1-10. It changes how many times per minute the water sprays on the heater and steams. It also has a big fan on top that circulates the air/smoke throughout the smoker which should help a lot with keeping even temps.

I may have to change out the temp and humidity dials to PID if I don’t get as accurate as I’d like with the knob adjustments.

[cdavis]

armyguy congrats on what sounds like a great smoker. Enjoy and keep us posted.

[processhead]

armyguy
That sounds like a nice unit with some useful features.
After you get it, put a couple of pans of water in it to simulate some meat or sausage. Then do some test runs to see how close the cabinet temperature holds to the set temperature.
This will give a good idea of the level of precision of the controls. Same with the humidity.

[bocephus]

armyguy when you get your new smoker going, give us a review.

[armyguy]

Will do guys! I have a feeling I may end up switching out the temp controller and maybe even the humidity controller for digital controls down the road. The oven style knob controller with temp markings I’m not a huge fan of, but I’ll try and see how accurate it is and maybe make my own marks during trials for the temps I’ll usually use. It’s supposed to ship March 17th which is almost 3 months after ordering. Need to figure out where I’m going to put it and get the 240v electrical ran soon, along with a 1/4” water line.