my examined life

My first smoke in over a year was on Memorial Day. I was planing on having brisket, but after finding chuck roast for a dollar a pound cheaper at Sam’s Club, I decided to give it a try since my Weber Smokey Mountain can smoke about anything. Luckily, the Virtual Weber Bullet had an article on smoking a chuck roll, of which chuck roasts are cut from.

I ended up picking up 14lbs of chuck roast which from the picture below looked beautiful.

When smoking, you always need to estimate the amount of time it will take to correctly cook the meat.  This is especially true for large cuts of meat since you don’t want your dinner guests to show up and gnaw through a piece of brisket or pork butt that is hours away from being done. Everything that I’ve read says chuck roll should be cooked just like brisket, which is about 1-1.5 hours per pound, so for the math challenged that works out to 14 to 21 hours of cook time. In my opinion, it’s better to over estimate than under estimate, since there’s nothing like bitting into undercooked pork.

Erring on the side of caution, I decided to put the meat on around 9:30 Sunday night to have the meat done by 3:30PM , and ready to eat at 4PM Monday afternoon.

Here’s how the meat looked before it went on, all nice and covered with a salt & pepper based rub that I made up. I’ll have to post that recipe later.

I actually go the meat on at 9:15PM, and pulled it off around 3:30PM for a grand total for 18 hours of smoky goodness. The smoker temperatures stayed between 225F and 250F the whole time. And yes, I actually woke up at 1:30 and 4AM to check the temps. All in all, it was a beautiful smoke that got be back in the mood of smoking again. I used hickory wood which works wonders with beef cuts, and the meat tasted wonderful. As you can see from the pictures, I had four chuck roasts, two I was able to slice like brisket and two pulled like pork. It was amazing. Enjoy the pics.