Saturday, January 30, 2016
Ambient Temp was unseasonably warm 65 degrees with a nice breeze..

Meat Prep – About 11 AM removed silver skin, salted as usual and slide back into plastic sleeves and into refrigerator. Both slabs are thick without much outside fat. When grill was ready I removed the slabs and rubbed in Memphis Dust shaken on moderately.

Grill Prep – Major addition to the set up was the portal for the temp probe’s cable made with conduit fittings. See Diary for details. Lite about 15 briquettes in chimney and when almost completely ashed over poured them into one end of the SnS. Added briquettes up to near the top edge with pecan chunks a little smaller than a tennis ball on the burning coals and along the top. Mounted temp probe with grate clip well to one side. Placed foil over lower grate up to SnS.

The Cook

1. 3:30 PM; grate temp was 240 – Put the two slabs on and realized they covered the cool zone side almost completely. [Realized later that is why they took so long to cook as the heat could not get below them very well.]
2. Did not add hot water to slot until 4:30 as forgot to do so. Temp up to then stay in the range set for the Thermoworks; i.e. 215 – 250.
3. At 5:30 Thermoworks low alarmed sounded. Stoked the unburned coals on to burning ones and moved a pecan chunk onto the burn. Temp came back into the mid 220s and held.
4. At 7:00 noted the color of the ribs does not look like they are cooking and temp had fallen to below 215. Re-stoked coals.
5. At 8:20 the bend test shows the ribs are not done even though they have been on and at temp for about 5 hours. Wrapped them together in foil and put them into the oven at 250 until 9:15. Set them wrapped in the foil on a wire rack to cool.