Today, I'm going to try something different with this Corned Beef that my wife loves to buy. I'd had this thought of instead of rubbing it with olive oil to make the dry rub stick, I decided to rub it with honey. I then seasoned it with the Big Bog Gibson's Dry Rub that has that nice sweat flavour to it. I also wanted to smoke this meat for at least 6 hours, so at about 11am the pit was setup with the mean going on at 11:30am with an internal temperature of 11°C. Meanwhile, the range hood temperature had gone through the roof and was sitting at about 500°F !!!

I brought my MacBook Air outside to the deck and was doing a bit of iOS coding when at 12:10pm, I heard a crash. I looked over to see that the lid of my Smokey Joe had been knocked off by the swelling of the meat. This did help some of the heat to escape, which was a blessing in disguise, because when I put the lid back on (and half a brick on top), I'd gotten the range hood temp down to a reasonable 300°F.

At 1:30pm, then internal temperature was 81°C, so I foiled up the meat and spritzed it with some apple cider vinegar and basted it with some of the juices/water that had collected in the drip pan. I spritzed it again at hour intervals, so at 2:30pm, 3:30pm and at 4:30pm, I noticed the foil had ripped (despite me double wrapping), so some of the spritz just went straight into the drip pan.

It was also at this point, I had noticed the coals had gone out, but was still giving about 220°F. I wrapped the meat with another layer of foil, spritzed and put it back til 4:45pm, which is when I took the meat off to rest.

So, how was it ? Still the best style of corned beef I like. I had it when it's boiled, however, when it is, it loses a lot of the saltiness to it. Corned Beef is a salty meat and when smoked, it retained all that salty flavour, which I didn't mind, but my wife said it was a bit much. The crust was nice, but the honey didn't overly add much sweetness to it as I was hoping for.

I love cooking chicken just as much as I love eating it. It's easy to smoke and the results are amazing. With this chook, I rubbed it the night before with some Stubb's Chicken Rub, which has a great herby flavour to it and had let that stay in the fridge overnight.

At 3:45pm, I fired up the pit with about 8 or 9 Heat Beads briquettes and a bunch of old ones from the last cook. They were still okay and good to use, you just have to be aware if you do a long cook, you're going to get more ash in the bottom of your Weber, which could clog up the bottom vents. Smokey Joe Silvers have this issue, the Gold edition (not like Apple's Gold edition) has vents on the side.

At 4:10 PM, the chicken went on with an internal temperature of 14°C. About an hour later, I put the veggies on the direct side. These veggies are wrapped in alfoil with butter and salt. The chicken's internal temperature was around 78°C at this point.

At 5:30pm, the range hood was holding steady at 255°F with the internal at 89°C. Ten minutes later, I took the bird off the BBQ and foiled it and allowed it to rest.

So, there were two things different about this cook than my previous chicken attempts. 1) I'm now using a water pan to catch the fat (saves a little bit of cleaning at the end), but more importantly adds even more moisture to the chicken and 2) as I stated, I foiled the chicken after taking it off and let it rest. With my other cooks, I just took it off and put it on a plate and let it rest. I'm not overly sure if foiling it did anything different to the chicken, but this BBQ is all about trying new and different things.

It was soooo good, I ate up my plate and then starting stripping all the meat I could off the bird and put that in a tupperware container. That's when my wife stepped in and said, hey I haven't had any yet and I said, well it's all there for you, just leave me some leftovers for my sandwich tomorrow. :)