Alton Brown DIY Smoker with upgrades?

This post is more of an open ended question about future projects and whether or not to undertake them.  If you've never seen Alton Brown's show good eats I won't lie I had never watched it either.  It was early food porn, with cheesy editing and acting, but this episode in particular launched a thousand copycat's and they come up in my feeds fairly often.



The question is do I go with a version of the Alton Smoker or do the Gizmodo BBQ upgrades?

I have a Weber Performer Grill, Black (Google Affiliate Ad) already, and have gotten some solid use out of it in the 5 years I've had it.  Recently I did a 8 hour smoke of a brisket on it with some measure of success, but I had to mind it carefully. I was adjusting temperature every hour, but checking more like every 20 minutes and even then my temperatures ranged greatly from 200°-300°F.  That method was way too much work.  Gizmodo recommended the smokenator for holding the fuel, and liquids, and The BBQ Guru (which I'll admit I don't fully understand the purpose of) as upgrades to the standard kettle grill.  I'm not sure that the smokenator alone will give me the smoking capabilities of the Alton "Macgyver" Brown's smoker.

The final, and surely less exciting option is the Bronze Medal kitchen hack from Food52 of using a soldering iron and a tin can to cold smoke on your grill.  I obviously saw it on lifehacker.  It's an option for smoking things but not bbq.  My current gut feeling is I should get the Smokenator, and make the cold smoker and save myself the heartache of some of the ocd and fancy upgrades I've seen of the Alton Brown backyard smoker.

Kitchen tools and stuff

Well this post is a little nostolgic for me.  I stopped reading Gizmodo over the summer as I finally admitted to myself that I didn't have enough time for my 200+ blog feeds as it was.  It doesn't stop the fact that Gizmodo always posted some really interesting gadgets for the home and kitchen.

This little toy caught my eye because really all of the items in this kit would be fairly useful and in that package I could keep it on the counter without much guilt.




And next Grill Clips.  They are exactly as bad ass as they sound.  Sure they are from Sur La Table[?], but only $15 and grilled veggies are the best part of summer.

Electronics cross post

Just a cross post to let people know I did an actual post on that other dumb blog about Electronics kits for kids.

So as all parents tend to do, I project the things that I wish that I had done onto my child and have been very excited about the prospect of teaching someone very young about electronics.

I previously had been interested in the Snap Circuits series[?] or here[?] of educational toys, but I'm sort of afraid that they are too limited (though very safe for little hands).  The Little Bits electronics kit looks more polished and will give a more compact finished product, but I'm concerned about the tiny pieces ending up in kids mouths.  Snap Circuits advertises as for ages 8 and up, where as Little Bits doesn't specifically have an age group.

Both of these options have some great opportunities to teach not only responsibility (with somewhat dangerous parts), but hopefully pique my child's interest in electronics.

Google Affiliate ads

So in an ongoing effort to document when I'm being a shill as per the FTC rules (know the laws of your country kids) I am going to start participate in the Google affiliate ads program.  That means some links will take you to a site that you could buy the specific product I'm talking about.  They will be marked every time, and link back to this page to let you know "Hey that link is an ad that could result in me getting paid should you buy it".  In essence it's an advertisement, but hey so is everything else in the world.

Why do this, or should you care?  I hope that they are unobtrusive (they are links not and not those annoying hover over keyword ads you see on tech reporting sites) and related to whatever I'm interested in.  Should that be interesting to you too, well all the better.