A little smoke

Cindy bought a single rack of baby back (pork) ribs from a co-worker. That's a 3.42 lb rack. It looks like I'll inaugurate the 2012 smoking season with a pop instead of a bang. I'm just going to smoke the one rack in the mini. In addition to the ribs, I'm going to bake 4 small potatoes. I've got them wrapped in foil with some peanut oil. I had originally planned to put them directly on the coals but I had forgotten about the lack of clearance between water bowl and coals. (In fact the water bowl is sitting directly on the coals until they burn down a bit. I'll just arrange them around the ribs and later on I can put them on the coals.

For seasoning I crushed some rosemary, black pepper and coriander and added adobo powder, ancho powder, rubbed sage and a little cumin. In these dry ingredients I crushed four cloves of garlic and mixed  in peanut oil to make a slurry that I rubbed on the ribs. The ribs were cut in half in order to fit the 14" grate from the mini-WSM.

Weather right now is 28° F, light wind at 9:00 mph and skies clear.

For smoking I'm using what's left of the Coshell briquettes from a previous smoke and some good old BK Blue. For smoking woods I'm going with hickory, maple, apple and oak.

Lit coals on a modified Minion lay at about 1:10.

time	temp	comment
1:10 PM		Lit recycled Coshell coals on the MM lay. All vents wide open.
1:35	240°/150° (grate/dome)	Ribs go on - spuds barely fit around the edge!
1:46	262°/	Temp recovering a bit too fast so I'm going to close the bottom vent to about half.
2:17	264°/
2:46	258°/	I peeked. ribs are cooking but not starting to pull back. Still not enough room on the coals for the spuds.
3:12	235°
4:00	262°/180°	Peeked again. The meat is just starting to pull back on the ribs. I put the spuds on the coals and one felt done but not the others. I'll need to take them off in about 20 minutes.
4:21	252°/150°	Spuds off - meat not yet done by the 'poke test.' Thicker parts of the ribs have not yet started to pull back and present resistance to poking. I should probably take the smaller piece off soon.
4:44	292°/	I need to get the smaller piece off and close the bottom vent a bit a bit more. When I picked up the smaller rack from one end, it broke in half. Done! The larger half remains on the cooker.
5:30	283°/155°	Took the larger end of the ribs off and closed up the vents.

(grate/dome) => Grate temp is the reading form a Maverick-73 probe near the edge of the top grate. Dome is a dial thermometer mounted in the lid. Due to a short probe on the dial, it reads way low.

They came out great!