Hey all, 4th cook ever tonight. Last 3 I would call 90% success rate for a new griller. Tonight I bombed.
Had guests over for dinner. Burgers. 80/20 beef with some mayo and mustard binder. Not a stupid Amount, but some.
Cleaned out bottom of kettle before the cook. Only 4th cook, wasn’t too dirty. I lit an entire almost stuffed chimney of fogo black bag lump. It seemed extra smoky as it was lighting. I actually hit it with leaf blower to get it to combust a little better and speed up.
Put all the coals in my newly modified “bro-n-sear” which I made today after seeing a YouTuber do it. Great mod with stock baskets. (I tried to post a pic of it but it’s only letting me upload the video)
Put on grate and lid. Let heat up. Got to at least 400 or so pretty fast.
I put the burgers on directly over the coals at first, planning to rotate the grate once I needed to. Started right over the heat.
About 42oz beef in 8 patties. Some big, some kid size.
Not sure exactly when it started, but I was like holy crap it is smoking up something awful. Tried explaining to my brother that this was nothing like the last 3 cooks he hadn’t witnessed.
I got nervous. Thought that smoke meant extreme fire and assumed that the burgers were burning. Rotated the grate and shut it. The next time I opened the lid it was literally like a ball of smoke that kept coming and truly filled my entire backyard. Not like a little bit off the vent. Like legitimately thought my neighbor might call the fire department.
Sort of freaking out and not thinking clearly, I’m still assuming this is too much HEAT and I need to cool it down so I closed the bottom vent way down. And probably the top vent too. (It all happened so fast lol)
The smoke got so much worse, as you’d expect with no airflow.
What I’m trying to figure out is this: did it start because I put oily beef right over the heat and it was just dripping grease on the coals and then I made it worse by messing with it and closing vents etc? I get it now, I needed to leave vents open, but even when I opened the lid fully and gave it max air flow, the smoking was still happening. It was slightly windy, blowing straight at my face so at the back of the grill. Not sure if this helped or hurt me.
The food wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t good. Sort of an acrid hot smoke taste. Not a sweet smoke. It was WAY smoked but in the worst way.
Trying to figure out how to not have this happen again. I really don’t think this was from a dirty grill and I don’t think it was from immediate grease dripping on coals.
Would love some advice. Video (if it uploads) is after it settled down a bit. This is like 25% of how bad it was prior to this. No exaggeration. Every time I opened the lid it nearly filled my entire yard with smoke.
Thank you all. So glad I’m saving the steaks for Friday.
by Lubbbbbb
2 Comments
The beef fat dripping on to the coals is what caused the smoke. The fat wanted to combust and burn off but there wasn’t enough air flow so you just got smoke.
Imagine an old car with a faulty carburetor that’s dumping too much fuel into the cylinders. It will run but not well and you get a bunch of smoke from the unburnt fuel.
You are lucky that it didn’t combust because with that much grease you could have easily had a raging fire on your hands.
Don’t feel bad, every new charcoal griller has experienced this exact same situation. When it happened to me, the coals lit and I had a monster fire instead of smoke.
You live to grill another day my friend 🍻
Sometimes u get a bit of smoke esp if u grill over a fire with closed lid.. its normal.. not a problem at all.. if ur neighbors are upset over a couple minutes of smoke then thats sad.. all part of the deal.