Weber Kettle:
- Place empty aluminum loaf pan in the middle of charcoal grate
- Build a smallish pile lump charcoal on both sides of aluminum loaf pan.
- Light Weber Chimney starter 2/3-full with lump charcoal
- Top unlit charcoal evenly with fully engaged charcoal.
- Fill aluminum loaf pan 3/4 full of water
- When charcoal has stopped billowing white smoke add 2-fist size dry wood chunks
- Replace cooking grate, position roast directly over aluminum loaf pan
- Rotate roast every 10-15 minutes (Especially important as meat is close to the fire and will burn if not rotated)
- When coals start to diminish add (preferably) lit lump charcoal to both sides. (I use a garden type hand trowel)

Roast is done when an instant read thermometer hits 125-degrees in the center of the roast. This yields a dead rare middle with the meat becoming progressively more well done toward the edges. Rare for you, med-well for Uncle Morty, well done end cut for Aunt Hildred.

Be sure to let the roast sit for 15-minutes, this is important so the juices redistribute throughout the meat, cut too soon and all the juice ends up on the platter.

Either of the marinades* for chicken (see Dinners #1 and #2) will work well with salmon. Be sure to coat with olive oil before putting on the grill; typically a piece of salmon will take about 45 minutes to 1-1/2 hours to smoke, depending on size and how thoroughly you like yours cooked. If the thin tail end gets overcooked for an entree portion, set it aside and crumble it into salads, where that texture will be fine. (Or you can simply tuck it under and the increased thickness will prevent it from overcooking.)

* Another marinade idea from the webmaster: mix soy sauce, rice vinegar, some brown sugar, and a little Grey Poupon or similar mustard.

Turkey

Cut out the back and snap the leg-thigh joint. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper and chipotle or cayenne pepper (not paprika, which burns) on the outside). Cook, insides down and somewhat flattened, for 3 to 4 hours, until meat temperature reaches 165 degrees. Let rest for 15 or 20 minutes before slicing.

Brisket

Very similar to a pork shoulder cook (Dinner #5). Look for a somewhat marbled, 12 to 14-lb. packer cut brisket with about a 1/4" fat cap on top, not totally trimmed clean. 9 to 10 hours before dinner, start a fire the usual way. Wash the brisket with water, not vinegar, and coat with mustard and rub. Place fat cap/top side up on grill. After 1/2 hour, close two vents by 1/3 each.

At 3 hour mark, flip to top side down and refill water pan. At 6 hour mark, light a starter full of charcoal and add to fire (see Dinner #5 for more tips), then turn again to top/fat cap side up.

At around 8 (for a smaller brisket) or 9 (for a larger one) hours, check the brisket with a meat fork; it's done when the fork slides in with almost no resistance. (The temperature should read around 197 in a meaty portion.) As with the pork shoulder, if you merely think it might be done, it's not done yet, go away for another half hour and check it again then. Let it sit for 20 minutes before slicing; the best way to slice is to first remove the muscle on top and clean the gray fatty material out from between the two pieces, then slice each piece against the grain, following the grain as it shifts within the piece of meat.

Fauxstrami™

True pastrami is cold-smoked from a dry-cured brisket. A WSM hot-smokes, and dry-cured brisket can be tough to find at retail anyway. WSM afficionados would never let inconvenient facts like those stop us, however, and so we've developed a way to produce a damn fine imitation with a top quality wet-cured corned beef. WSM Fauxstrami may not be perfectly authentic pastrami, but it tastes plenty good.

Look for a 12-14 lb. packer cut corned beef brisket with both pieces and a nice fat cap. Needless to say, meat quality is paramount here and you really want to avoid the fakier, more processed supermarket corned beefs. Two to three full days before you plan to smoke it, begin a process of soaking the brisket in cold water in a 5-gallon plastic bucket in the refrigerator to leach some of the salt back out, changing the water every 12 hours or so. Since the brisket will shrink by a good half or more, concentrating the remaining salt powerfully, this lengthy step is a must.

Make a rub consisting of five parts peppercorns to one part whole coriander, ground in a spice grinder and mixed with some onion and garlic powder and a little ancho chile pepper. Apply a light layer of mustard to the brisket and rub the rub in thickly and thoroughly.

The cook begins like a regular brisket cook except that because it has been cured, it probably will only take 6-7 hours-- and also because it has been cured, it will be harder to tell when it is done, so I recommend doing this only after you've done a couple of conventional briskets and gotten a feel for the cut. Unlike with a regular brisket, you can easily overcook one of these to the point of dryness. Let the finished meat sit for 20 minutes or so, then separate and clean the fat away like with the regular brisket.

Alternately, some people seal the brisket straight off the grill in a bag and refrigerate it overnight, then reheat it the next day in a light beef broth; the result is that it steams itself and gets a fall-apart texture. I don't do this, however, because I prefer it keeping enough body to slice-- and also, I believe in the old saying, why reheat tomorrow what you can eat hot right now?

Smoking in Cold Weather

When the cold Chicago winter wind is blowing, it can be difficult to keep an adequate cooking temperature inside the chamber. The easiest way to remedy that is to replace the water pan with a more heat-retaining material, such as sand.

Brinkman makes a 2-gallon water pan which fits perfectly in the Weber chamber, allowing the same inch clearance around the entire pan. Fill one of these with play sand from a hardware store, to 1-1/2 inches below the rim. Then cover the top of the pan with wide aluminum foil (which, needless to say, you will replace for each cook), tucking it under the rim.

The reason not to use sand year-round is that water can only get so hot and will help keep the cooking temperature in a range near its boiling point. While sand will keep getting hotter and hotter, and on a warm summer day with a blazing fire can make the cooking chamber too hot for good slow BBQ.