For some reason setting up the grill at night, with the knowledge it will be running unattended, is a bit unnerving. I suppose it’s because I’m not normally firing up a grill at 10:00 pm in the dark, I won’t be around to notice a sudden shift in the weather and take counter-measure, and leaving a fire unattended goes against everything we were told about fire safety as a kid. What I was really afraid of is the morning dew. I kept having visions of the condensation forming on my electronics and frying the Stoker temperature controller unit. In the end I put everything in a Tupperware container that I had punched a small hole in for cables to run out of. Then I plugged the hole with some aluminum foil. Nothing got fried, so I guess it all worked out. Here’s a picture of the setup that I took the next morning.
I apologize that I don’t have any fancy graphs of the cooking temperature to share. I’m still having troubles getting the data logging software working. I actually spent time to make sure it would work before I started the grill this time. I plugged the Stoker in and started up the data logging software. Everything was working fine! I would hold the pit temperature thermometer and I could see the temperature spike on the graph. Huzzah.Once I had fire started, the grill going, and had all the probes configured I tried starting the data logging software again and… no dice. The software claimed it couldn’t find the Stoker. That’s the same problem I had last time I had a pork butt on the grill, but didn’t have earlier in the day when I tested the system. I’ve concluded that it might have something to do with my actual network. Earlier in the day I had the Stoker plugged into the same router as the computer running the data logger. When the Stoker is at the grill there is an additional hub between the data logger and the Stoker. I need to see if running the software on a computer that has to go through fewer network shenanigans might solve the problem.
It’s a real shame I don’t have the graph too. I made and observation during this cook and would really like to see if the data supports my hunch. This time it appeared to me that the Stoker was doing a better job at holding the grill exactly at the temperature I set it to (220°)…until the next morning. Then the temperature seemed to hover at around ten to sixteen degrees higher than what I had set the grill to. I think it has to do with the sun. The grill is painted black and I think the sun is acting as a secondary radiant heat source that the Stoker can’t control. It can try and lower the temperature of the grill’s internal fire to compensate but the Evil Egg’s ceramic holds the heat too well and the grill’s temperature heads north with the intensity of the sun.
In the future, once I get the data logger working, it will be interesting to see if the temperature tracking plays out like I suspect. It will also be interesting to see if cooks started while the sun is beating down on the grill track better because the Stoker can compensate for the sun from the get go…
Some of you might be wondering how’d the fifteen and a half hour pork butt came out….. like only a piece of pork imbued with fifteen plus hours of smoke can…..delicious. I also made a white barbeque sauce from scratch. The ones I’ve tried from the bottle weren’t very good. I’m very happy with my version. (Hint: the pre-bottled ones don’t use enough vinegar and pepper.) Dawn remarked that she liked that we had reduced making pulled pork to something so simple we can do it on our sleep.
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