Had a whole brisket day fall apart in 20 minutes, changed my whole process

Last Saturday I put a 14 pound prime brisket on at 6am, wrapped it at 165, and everything was going perfect until my temp probe slipped out and by the time I noticed the flat hit 214 and turned to leather. I got so angry I almost quit smoking meat altogether, but then a buddy of mine who runs a food truck in Austin told me he checks his probes with a rubber band wrapped around the cable before he even starts, and that little trick would have saved me. He also said he never trusts a single probe, he runs two at all times, one in the flat and one in the point, and that one mistake cost me a $60 hunk of meat and 12 hours of babysitting. Now I use a clip on the grate to hold the cable steady and I check both temps every 45 minutes like it's my job. Has anyone else had a single probe failure ruin a whole cook, or am I just the unlucky one? What do you use to keep your probes from sliding around mid-sleep?

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charles91913d ago

Drove 40 minutes last week to pick up a replacement thermometer from a shop that sells them to BBQ comp teams, and the guy behind the counter told me he's seen more ruined cooks from probe slippage than from bad fires, which made me realize it's the same story everywhere in life. People lose their whole day over one little thing that could've been fixed with a dollar's worth of prevention, like a bungee cord on a trailer or a spare set of keys in the house. That rubber band trick your buddy uses is just the start, I've started taping my probe cable to the handle of my smoker with blue painter's tape, and it's never moved once, not even in a windy thunderstorm. The bigger pattern I've noticed is that most people, myself included, only learn to check their gear twice after something expensive falls apart, and that's just dumb because the fix is always boring and simple. Now I double check everything, the probes, the wood supply, even the propane gauge on my backup tank, before I even light the fire, and it's made me a calmer person overall. You're not unlucky, you just got hit by the same wall everybody hits when they trust one tool too much, but at least now you know the secret that the pros live by.