Originally Posted by
corky
Well cooking with charcoal is definitely a high wire act compared to gas. I had just added some charcoal to the grill as mine was burning way down and 5 minutes later it was done so I did that for nothing...hard to predict & control the temp but the flavor is the best.
I debated whether to do indirect first or last...I think the conventional wisdom is to do indirect first and sear later but I wanted to use my coals while they were hot and worried that they wouldn't be going enough for a sear at the end.
I can do a steak or piece of chicken or fish w/o a probe but little else. Whole chicken or roasts can be unpredictable.
Are you using briquettes or hardwood chunks?
IME, searing at the end 30 seconds a side or so works much better than at the start if you want to avoid a grey band on the meat. That picanha I did a few ago and posted a pic of was done with a quick sear at the end.
Do you use a pit probe as well? My Thermopro has two probes so you can measure pit temp and internal meat temp. That can really help you make adjustments to the air vents to get the temp where you want it. On long slow cooks knowing the pit temp is as important as knowing the meat temp. I wouldn't worry about overfilling with charcoal. If you're worried about not having a sear ready then just have some charcoal heating up in a starter chimney that you can pour in for your sear. Whatever you don't, use charcoal wise, you can use next time.
The way I do a reverse sear is pull it off the BBQ, put some oil and pepper on the steak while the charcoal gets lots of air and starts to get really hot again, then quick sear 60/90 seconds a side and that's it. It would be more difficult to do it that way with a whole tri-tip without adding some hot charcoal to the kettle, because of the area size of the TT.
I use briquettes but they're more like some sort of extruded charcoal (pic here:
https://mysliceoflife.com.au/wp-cont...brickettes.jpg). I only use wood for smoke.