Double Smoked Ham

Every Christmas the fire department I work for buys us a holiday ham, which usually doesn't excite me much as I'm not a big ham person. Well when I was in the mood to do some cooking on the UDS I had this huge ham staring me in the face every time I opened the freezer. I decided I would cook the ham on the UDS and see how it turns out, I was not disappointed. I cooked the ham for about 5 hours at 350º, which the temp was perfect but it was a little long and the ham began to dry out and lose some of its cure. I had taking and wrapped it in foil for the last hour and put a nice thick cap of brown sugar on top of it. The end result was a very delicious ham and I'm pretty confident that I will be cooking the hams for most of the family get holiday parties.

Ribs and Chicken

A few weeks ago I had the UDS fired up for some ribs and chicken, the ribs were for lunches and the chicken we had for dinner that night. As usual my UDS served up some great results and was an ease to cook on. The ribs are pork babyback's, they were slathered in mustard and sprinkled with Head Country before placing on the smoker. I cooked them for close to 6 hours before pulling them off the smoker, at which point I sauced them with honey and Three Little Pigs BBQ sauce. The final product was almost perfect, the meat was just shy of fall off the bone with a wonderful smoke ring and great flavore.

The smoker chugged along at 250 degrees F all day long and needed very little attention. It was a nice calm warm day and we spent most of the afternoon in the backyard playing. I cooked over Ace of Hearts lump charcoal and smoke was provided with chunks of hickory, probably my new favorite.

The chicken was rubbed down with the bbq rub I made at the festival and placed on the smoker. I cooked it four 5 hours and an internal thigh temp of 180 degrees F. I sauced it up with some Famous Daves Sweet and Sassy, then let in carmalize for about 10 minutes. The end result was delicious and the whole family loved it, so it's Tot approved!

Weekend BBQ!

I got the itch to make some BBQ this past weekend and was in the mood for some pulled pork sandwiches and some smoked Italian Sausage also known as a Fatty.

A Fatty is simply a pound of breakfast sausage that is sprinkled with what ever seasonings you like and placed on the smoker to cook. Now if your feeling really adventurous you can flatten the sausage out and place what ever you like on top, such as bell peppers or cheese, then simply roll it back into a log being sure to cover everything you put in it. What you wind up with is an incredibly delicious treat that is best described as an orgy of flavor. It always makes a great snack while your waiting on the larger cuts of meat to finish cooking.

The pulled pork was about a 5 lb. butt that I put on the smoker at around 10 am. It cooked till 6pm at which point it finally hit an internal temp of 195ºF, which needed some helping because I was able to hold the smoker at 225ºF all day long. The problem was that at around 5pm the internal temperature was 160º, at which point I wrapped it in foil. This helps to hold the heat in and seems to steam it a little bit. The end product was a very juicy and tender pulled pork with a nice subtle smoke flavor. I was pretty happy with the over all cook because it was an incredibly windy day, which always make for an interesting day barbecuing.

Ugly Drum Smoker; Lid handle and Body Handle

If you remember I built my own BBQ smoker this last fall and had it cook ready, but I'm far from having it to the point I would call it completed. I have spent most of this winter waiting for materials to come available to use as handles for both the lid and the body.

The lid handle is actually a grab bar from the side of a Fire Truck and is held in place with 1/4" nuts and bolts. The handle bar is held in place with a small machine screw, this prevents the bar from rotating freely inside the risers. I also added a small Tel Tru thermometer to the center of the lid as I had noticed that the center of the cooker runs hotter on cold days.

There are two other additions to the smoker as well. One is the chrome exhaust tip I added to the smoke stack, which is simply a little added flair. The second addition are two 6 inch drawer pulls to the body, they sure help in carrying it across the yard.

Now I still have a few more additions to make, such as a work table, a bottle opener, and possibly a new thermometer to the side. The thermometer currently residing there is becoming unreliable and has certainly seen it's better days. I may even make a small hole so I can run a digital thermometer probe into the cook chamber, but I'm not sure about that one yet as I will need to think of way of sealing the whole up when it's not in use.

My Ugly Drum Smoker Build!

I have spent the last year researching how to build a smoker that would give me steady temperatures and be capable of doing an eight to ten hour cook with out being forced to add more fuel. Now I could spend some serious money on a Weber Smokey Mountain or a Traeger, but I really wanted something that I built. The plans I found were to build a smoker that has affectionately been named the Ugly Drum Smoker or UDS for short. I visited such sites as The Pickled Pig, the BBQ-Brethren, and recently the BBQ Central; all these sites are loaded with information on building this smoker. I must have spent months crawling through all the posts with ideas that have succeeded and ideas that have failed in the attempt of building one of these smokers. In the end I decided to try and keep my build as cheap and simple as possible.  So I stuck to the basics and even borrowed from a commercially built unit known as the Big Drum Smoker.

The toughest part of this whole project was tracking down a food quality 55 gallon drum and it took a better part of a year to get one, so be prepared for a long hunt. I finally landed a barrel that had contained honey at one point in it's life and at the time I found it, it was being used as a trash can with barrel liners. In fact when I got it home, you could still see some of the honey residue inside of it. The barrel was lined with a tan epoxy and there is two ways to go about removing it. The easiest would be to take it to a body shop and pay to have it sand blasted inside and out, a few have even then had the body shop powder coat the outside for them. The cheapest way is to load it up with wood and burn it out, which is the technique I chose. Before I lit my fire I drilled four 3/4" hole around the bottom for intakes. It's important to do this before the burn as it will guarantee plenty of airflow for a good hot fire.  I used this as an opportunity to burn up all the limbs I had collected from my yard over the last year as well as an oak log that was had been a yard ornament with the families last name carved into it. I did two burns that totaled 6 hours and this was enough to burn off all the paint from the outside of the drum, but I still had a fair amount of the liner left inside. I used a 3M Rust and Paint Remover drill attachment wheel that I found in the paint removal aisle at Lowe's. It took me about an hour to remove what was left of the liner as well as some rust that had formed from it's previous life.

When it came time to drill the holes for the cooking grate I had to do a little math to find out how far down to put the cooking grate. What you want is to have the cooking grate 24 inches from the bottom of the charcoal basket, with 2 inches below the charcoal basket for ash buildup. My barrel was 34 inches tall, so I did some simple math and came up with having a cooking grate 7 inches from the top of the drum.

For my charcoal basket I took the lid from an old Brinkmann bullet that I had now sitting around. I drilled out the bottom and the sides with a 1/2 inch drill bit, this should allow the ash to fall away and good air flow to feed the fire. The sides I drilled with the same size drill bit as the bottom, it may need more holes for better ventilation but I will see how this works out. I also used the legs from the body of the old smoker to hold the now basket up off the bottom giving it a clearance of 2 inches. I plan on adding an 18 inch pie pan underneath the basket and attach it to the basket to aide in ash removal after the cook.

In effort to keep the cost down I used stainless steel caps as a means to control the intakes. As you can see I put a 1-1/2 inch machine screw with two nuts to act as a grab handle to remove the cap if more air is needed. This may be revised with using some black pipe nipple's, nipple cap's, and a ball valve for better air control.

When it came time to drill the holes for the cooking grate I had to do a little math to find out how far down to put the cooking grate. What you want is to have the cooking grate 24 inches from the bottom of the charcoal basket, with 2 inches below the charcoal basket for ash buildup. My barrel was 34 inches tall, so I did some simple math and came up with having a cooking grate 7 inches from the top of the drum. I used 1 1/2 inch x 1/4 inch stainless steel bolts with lock washer and nut to rest my cooking grate on. I scavenged a cooking grate from an old 22 1/2 inch Weber kettle that I had lying around. As you can see it was a bit rusty, so to fix that I heated it up in the gas grill and hit with my BBQ steel bristle brush. After it was free of rust and as much gunk as I could scrape off I sprayed it with Pam in preparation for seasoning it.
     Seasoning is an important step, the better seasoned a smoker is the more flavor you food will have. Now I'm not talking about having a pit or a grate that is so disgusting your spouse or kids would not eat out of it, but you do want the pit to be good a greasy. The seasoning process is as easy as spraying down the inside of the cooking chamber with Pam or covering with any cooking oil, then start a basket of charcoal as if you were going to be actually cooking. Then let the pit come up to cooking temperature 225º-275º F. Be sure to throw quite a few chunks of wood on there, like hickory, to help the seasoning process.
   My extra's to this grill include a 6 inch piece of 2 inch conduit for a stack as well as a coat hook to the under side of the lid, which gives me a place to hang the lid while tending to the pit. I have plans to put a handle on the lid as well as two handles on the side of the body to make it easier to move around. I also have plans for adding a table to the side so I have a place to set things while I'm cooking. The paint is flat red Rust-Oleum 2000º High Heat Paint, that I picked up from Autozone. It took me two cans to paint the drum, but I also was forced to paint outside which is always makes painting with a rattle can difficult.

The thermometer required a 7/8 inch hole drilled just below the cooking grate, and is held in place with a nut and washer that attach to the back of the thermometer. This was the last hole I drilled because I wasn't quite sure where I wanted it. There are some who like the thermometer on the lid as appose to the side, which I found out from later cooks was because there is some big temperature differences when cooking in cold and windy weather. I have not had the opportunity yet to cook on a day where the temperatures got above 50º and the wind was not blowing. I will be sure to update you when some warmer weather comes along and I can get a better idea on how even the temperatures will be.