Carrying Smoke In A Bucket

Well, last night, I paid the price for not having cleaned out the ash tray in my new pellet smoker. The manual tells you to do it after every use, but when I did, there was so little ash that it didn't seem worthwhile, so I'd been letting it go.

I let it go too long.

The ash filled the thing up to the point where it clogged the burning chamber which meant very little air could get in to feed the flames. When I turned it on last night to grill some pork chops, the pellets simply piled up on the heating element and never caught fire. Since the temperature didn't rise, the smoker figured it needed to add more pellets. The pile grew bigger and bigger.

I finally turned it off, emptied the ash tray and scraped away the mound of pellets from inside the burning chamber. The smoker isn't built to let you get your hands in there without disassembly, so all I could do was push the pellets off to the side. I figured they'd ignite once the main fire chamber lit and I'd be done with them. They did and I was.

In the conflagration that followed, photographed for posterity, of course, I got this gorgeous shot of what looks like a bucket of smoke.

It's a bucket that hangs underneath the smoker, there to catch drips of fat and juice from the meat. Instead, there was so much smoke that it jetted out of every orifice.

Some of it went downwards and into the buckets, only to be caught and then slowly waft up like it's doing in the top photograph. I got really worried when smoke started coming out of the pellet reservoir and wondered if the fire had gone up the auger and into the mountain of pellets therein. It hadn't.

Instead, the excess pellets inside the chamber were burned off, photos were taken, laughter ensued and our kids were kept abreast of my latest foolishness by text while we sipped our wine and beer. In the end, the chops came out quite nicely. The photo below is wife kitteh's. She likes hers marinated in teriyaki, which carmelizes into char almost instantly when you put it on the grill. It wasn't burned, it was done fairly well.

Memo to self: Clean out the ash tray after every use.