Smoking Meat

Since we "borrowed" for long term a BBQ set from Jack, I have been wanting to smoke some meat. We first tried it with chicken wings but I wasn't really prepared for it. In the end it took like 4 hours to smoke and it wasn't fantastic. Second time around we were more prepared and the first step to smoking meat is....

Get the smoking wood chips and the meat to smoke. This time around we decided to try something simple which is lamb shoulders. Why lamb shoulders is because lamb doesn't need to be 100% cooked through and it is quite thinly sliced.

We marinated the lamb shoulder over night with some recipe online with onion, mixed herbs, orange peels, etc. The next day the first thing we did was to soak the wood chips to ensure that the wood chips do not burn when thrown next to the fire....

When the time came, we started the fire...

The most important thing is to ensure that the charcoal is burnt right through with a layer of ash on top to ensure when the lid goes on top of the BBQ that the charcoal will continue to burn without too much oxygen.  The first time we did it we didn't know about this and had to relight the fire a few times. Once the fire was nice and burning....

The wood chips are put into a smoking pouch and holes are punched into the top to ensure the smoke can escape. Then the wood chips are put on top of the charcoal and finally.....

Along with the meat we also had some vege to smoke which will go in half way through....

Unfortunately, again the fire died once and I decided instead of putting the pouch on top of the charcoal, I put it on the side and it will still smoke. So that is what I did and put everything in for another hour and hope for the best. After 1 hour of getting the fire ready, 2 hours of smoking....

The results still a bit of a failure. It took far too long to cook and even after 2 hours of smoking, some parts of the lamb shoulder was still a raw. It taste ok but not as good as it should be.

Next time we must try it again but this time with the smoke pouch on the side to ensure that the fire keeps going and maintaining the heat in the BBQ. I also need to get a freaking meat thermometer which is surprisingly hard to find here in Malaysia.