Expert: John Langenfelder - 12/19/2008

Question
I was using my new Char-Broil smoker with a fire box on the side. I was using lump charcoal and I seems to go through alot. I refilled it 3-4 times over about 1.5 hours and I couldnt get the temp over about 250, how do I make it last for a few hours? I used a chimney starter with a load from that everytime I added. Also I live in Iowa and it was about 20 degrees at the time. It also seem to cook very unevenly. I was cooking chicken breasts and the one closer to the box got done about 30 minutes before the other one. Please tell me what im doing wrong.

Answer
Ben,

It is not what you are doing, it was you are trying to do.  an outside temperature of 20 degrees is going to be very difficult to do especially with your set up.  Trying to heat up the smoke chamber using an offset firebox in a char broil is very difficult.  Heat rises so a lot of the heat in the fire box is not going to get through that big smoke chamber.  Char broils are not well insulated (thin metal walls) so the heat goes out and the cold stays in.  You don't say how much lump charcoal you were using but you might need several chimney fulls to get the heat up.

Looks like you were just doing 2 chicken breasts.  I would put them side by side at the opening between the firebox and chimney so that they cook evenily and halway through I would flip and rotate them.

FYI,

You might be able to put one of the grates from the smoke side into the firebox side and cook your chicken breast on the grate using the indirect method.