Again with the grilling

I know what you want. You crave grilling data. At least I hope you are or you might want to skip this post.

This weekend I got the Stoker working with the data logging software. I decided to slow roast a duck for its maiden run.


(Clicky for larger image)

I set the Stoker to 200°. You can see that at about 13:15 the grill temperature reached 200° and did a reasonably good job holding the temperature. I think it’s interesting to see the three humps over 200° where the fire overshot its mark then came back to its target temperature. Each hump gets progressively smaller until at around 15:00 the fire temperature stabilizes. I wonder if it normally takes about two hours for the grill's internal temperature to stabilize? There is a lot of mass in all that ceramic so it wouldn’t surprise me.

[It might be worth noting that the sun was beating down on the grill the entire time but it held the target temperature….I think it’s safe to assume that if the grill is started while the sun is warming it, then it’s able to compensate for the extra heat source. Now I need to start the grill the night before to see if my hunch last time was correct…]

At about 16:15 I opened the grill to put a piece of salmon in for Dawn. You can see how the temperature in the grill takes an immediate 30° dip but recovers quickly. Shortly after that I set the target temperature for 300° because I wanted to eat duck sometime that day.

It’s also kind of neat to see how smooth the curve is on the meat temperature. Dawn said that it looked “textbook” to her. She also claimed that she can per her degree to use and use data provided by the graph to work out all sorts of heat/mass transfer equations on our food. How exciting is that! Look forward to sometime in the future when Dawn works out the thermal conductivity of pork butt!

The duck came out great. This time I just rubbed some salt and pepper into the skin then smeared honey all over it….then some more black pepper for good measure. I was shooting for a smoked honey peppered duck. There wasn’t really a recipe; it’s just something I made up. I thought honey and duck sounded good. I was a little disappointed that the honey flavors weren’t really there at the end….but duck looked great. I guess most of the sugar in the honey caramelized.


We had some potato rolls sitting around so I cut the duck breast into slices and put it on the roll with some more honey and black pepper. Little honey black peppered roasted duck sandwiches are a good thing.

For an encore I took the carcass and threw it in a pot with some water and onions, carrots, celery to make a stock. The stock was just ok….I was hoping for a bit more depth of flavor. I used it last night to make some Italian wedding soup. With some spice adjustment (read: added lots more pepper) it came out down right tasty.