Friday, May 11, 2018

Converting My WSM to a Charcoal Grill for Steak Kabobs

A few weeks ago I was smoking a slab of ribs to try out a new recipe, not intending for ribs to be our dinner. And my wife decided we should have steak kabobs. Given I had the WSM fired up, I decided to take a shot at turning it into a standard Weber kettle charcoal grill to cook the kabobs. Turns out, it was very easy to do, and was a nice improvement on taste from my usual Weber gas grilling.

Only Using the Bottom Bowl

As anyone familiar with a WSM knows, it comes in 3 pieces. There's the bottom bowl, where the charcoal sits. The middle section which holds the water pan and 2 racks. And then the top piece, which is the lid. 

For this exercise, I just got rid of the middle section and placed the top grate directly on top of the bottom bowl, with the charcoal just below it as usual.

2-zone Grilling Setup

2-zone Setup with the Rack on Top

I lit a new chimney of charcoal to get some really hot coals. I then put them on the usual bottom charcoal rack, but all on one side. This was so I could have a 2-zone grill such that the side of the rack that sits directly over the charcoal is very hot, and the opposite side of the rack away from the charcoal isn't getting direct fire.

Closed with the Lid on Top

I then put the lid of the smoker on top of it to close everything off so it could get really hot, given steaks need the grill to pretty much be as hot as possible for a nice sear. To help it get hot, I made sure that all of the vents were open so the air flow would be pouring through and keeping the coals going.

Note that while this setup works well, there is no natural groove for the lid to sit on the bottom bowl (since it's not technically meant to do this), so you just want to be careful you don't bump it or it could easily slide off and fall.

Steak Kabobs on the "Grill"

After letting the grill sit with the hot coals and lid on top for a while, I decided the grill was hot enough to cook my kabobs. I wasn't exactly sure how hot it was (I didn't use my usual grill thermometer and didn't trust the built-in thermometer given the way it was setup), but I started with my kabobs directly over the coals. Not an important part of this post, but I was cooking steak-house marinade kabobs pre-made at Whole Foods.

When I'm cooking on my gas grill that I know so well, I would usually give these kabobs about 4 min on a side, then flip for another 4 min, and then 1 min each on the sides that hadn't touched the grill yet. This is to come away with them cooked medium rare. I decided to follow that approach on this and see if it was cooking too fast or too slow using my Thermapen meant thermometer.

In this case, it turned out that they needed to cook for closer to 15 minutes as opposed to my usual 9-10 minutes. Not a huge difference, but clearly it wasn't as hot as my gas grill is. This can be fixed next time by allowing the hot coals to stack higher, closer to the grate, as opposed to having them really flattened out as I did this time around to be careful.

However, I will say at the end of cooking, the outside of the kabobs was getting a nice char, and to prevent it from getting too much more, I moved the kabobs to the indirect heat side for the final 5 minutes, and that seemed to work really well (this is what you can see in the above picture).

Finished Product - Steak Kabobs on a WSM

The kabobs ended up being cooked perfectly medium rare, and had a really nice traditional charcoal grill flavor to them. I considered this a nice upgrade over my usual gas grill. So I will definitely utilize this technique going forward. It takes more time and effort relative to my convenient gas grill, so this probably won't be a regular occurrence, but it's definitely going to be worth it on occasion to mix it up.

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