Smoking and grill meat is a tradition over 1,000,000 old. Anthropologists have found evidence of cooking from proto-humans, so we've been cooking for longer than we've been homo-sapiens.
What I'm saying is that Smoking and Grilling is easy and people have been doing it on crude equipment for a long time. You can smoke by digging a hole, or by setting up a grate on cinderblocks or stones. You can also smoke on an $8.00 Clearance portable grill from Target.
The point is that you do not need a $2000 or even a $200 smoker to make great food! I made some of the best food I'd ever made on this for this cook.
The meat I cooked was a Chuck Eye Roast. Some people call Chuck "Poor Man's Brisket" but the Chuck Eye specifically is close to the ribeye. Therefore you can cook it to Medium Rare (135F) like a Rib Roast and it will still be juicy and tender and flavorful like a good Ribeye, as opposed to low and slow and high like a proper Chuck Roast or a Brisket (203F+)
That is a quarter-sheet tray, small enough to fit in a Toaster Oven. This is a tiny 1.85lb roast, that I got at Wegmans for $12. This was not on sale. I dry-brined it overnight by liberally coating it with kosher salt and leaving it in the fridge overnight. This pulls moisture, resulting in a shorter cook, and more flavorful meat. It also tenderizes the meat. I scored the fat, as I always do for nearly every cook that has a large piece of fat like that.
We will be cooking this roast like a reverse sear. Low and slow for step one, then hot and fast fire for step two. So, the next day, I set up the grill for two-zone heat. This really just means coals on one side of cooker for indirect cooking. For a large grill you can use whatever charcoal you like and I frequently use Natural Lump. BUT, for a small grill you should use briquettes. Natural lump burns from the outside-in, and there is a minimum size critical mass necessary for Lump You need enough to form some small pockets where the Lump can concentrate heat, sort of like the interior of a campfire. This is not true of Briquettes. You can light a single briquette, and that briquette will continue to burn until it is exhausted, because the entire briquette burns evenly, forming a lattice of air and fuel pockets inside itself. The water pan is necessary in small cookers like this for two reasons: it keeps the charcoal away from the meat and further reduces the direct heat during the slow-cook phase.
I used 25 Kingsford briquettes which I calculated at 67 cents worth of charcoal. I used a charcoal chimney I purchased twelve years ago for $15. I also used some mesquite chips I had lying around but I wouldn't put more than 25 cents. The water pan was 39 cents. So overall, including the meat and the grill itself, I'm still at around $21 for the whole cook!
I put pepper only on the roast. You can pretty much put whatever seasoning you want on the meat. This is the least important step IMHO, Beef especially will stand up will to most seasonings and you could put pretty much anything on there: Taco Seasoning, BBQ Seasoning, Mediterranean Season, or just plain pepper like I did.
You can see in the above picture that the meat is off the direct heat, but the fat cap is facing the heat. Whether you are cooking a roast, a brisket, a steak, chicken, fish, you always place the fattiest portion towards the heat. So for a roast you put the fat cap towards the heat. For chicken you face the dark meat towards the heat. For fish you face the skin towards the heat. This ran for about one hour until the roast reached 115F. You can take it further if you want a Medium or Medium-Well roast, but I would start the direct-heat portion about 10F less than you want the pull-off temp, or 20F less than you want the FINAL temp. It will go up about 10F during the direct heat phase and another 10F during the rest period.
At this point it is time to remove the water bath and rake the coals into a pile. You want them touching, you want them feeding each other, you want them hot. You can blow on them a little bit to get them even hotter, but do this with the meat off so you don't get ash all over your roast!
Flames are welcome, even encouraged during this step. You want HIGH, HOT heat. You should flip consistently, every 30s to every minute. You want to develop a dark brown crust. Black is alright but you don't want too much char or it will taste bitter.
It will be done once the crust has developed AND the interior temp is 10F less than the target temp. So for medium 135F shoot for 125F and it will carry-over cook about 10F.
This turned out to be one of the all-time most delicious roasts I've made. Just as good, if not better, than many of the Ribeye roasts I've made over the years. I will definitely be buying this cut again! At $7/lb (at a high-end grocery store, no less!) it seems like it might be one of the last remaining true Butcher's Cuts, since Ribeye roasts can easily go for 3x-4x that price.
We served with Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Summer Squash, and did not have any leftovers.
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