Upgrade your offset smoker with tuning plates. Find out why this is one of the best grill mods you can create with our guide and tutorial.
One of the best modifications YOU can make to your offset smoker is to install a set of tuning plates.
They can take your smoked foods to new heights by spreading the heat and maintaining the slow, lower temperatures that are so important to good grilling smoking.
In this guide, I will walk YOU through the steps YOU need to install your offset smoker trim plates correctly and in a way that will provide years of use.
I’ll also highlight the best smoking tuning plates and give you some tips on how to get the most out of them.
Let’s get into that.
Why do some offset smokers need tuning plates?
While the best offset smokers are always my favorite backyard kitchen for making a good traditional smoked meal on the grill, their old-school design means they present a few hurdles to being completely frugal.
Due to the offset chamber, the combustion air must flow both laterally and vertically through the exhaust flap, also known as the vent (find out more in our guide: What is an offset smoker ?). This is not a design flaw per se, but can mean that cheap offset smokers have these misaligned due to poorer craftsmanship or lazy construction.
This is a problem because misaligned vents can lead to poor airflow and heat retention. Luckily, tuning plates can help us fix this.
What were multimedia reed plates?
Tuning Plates are a quick and easy solution to any problem your charcoal smoker is having with heat loss or low cooking temperatures.
They take the form of steel plates that you can build into the bottom of your smoker’s main chamber, usually under your cooking grates.
They then help reflect the heat back into your smoker, with the aim of spreading the heat more evenly throughout the chamber.
Cheap offset smokers very often have trouble spreading from where the firebox meets the chamber to the other end of the cooking grates. Plates often help against this.
They can also radiate heat and slowly, helping to maintain cooking temperatures even for the hours you record.
As a bonus, this heat retention can help minimize the effects of disruptions such as wind, rain or even when you open the door to check your prized skirt for the 20th time…
With that all out of the way, let’s go into the facility.
What do you need
Unlike many other rotisserie mods, this doesn’t require a ton of tools or hardware gear. You can die with just two gadgets and some experimental food to control the temperature.
Reed plates
I’ll see what chainring sets I recommend next.
Dual temperature probe
To ensure that we have installed the panels correctly, we need to be able to compare the temperature readings from the smoker’s combustion chamber end and also from the other end of the chamber. A dual rack temperature probe is the best tool to do this.
“Test” foods.
Smoking a load of test dishes is a good way to measure the effect of the plates on the full surface of the cooking grates. For this reason, do not use a single large piece of meat, such as B. pork tenderloin or beef brisket. Instead, pick a bunch of little things that won’t cost you an arm or a leg. Mad Scientist BBQ recommends crackers, which I think is also a great budget option.
Also install rotisserie tuning plates
Start your smoker with no plates installed. I like to use a charcoal fireplace to light the embers before transferring them to the firebox. If you don’t have one, check out our guide to the best charcoal fireplaces.
Use your dual probe to take a temperature reading at both ends of your smokehouse and see the difference. The combustor end will be higher, but the discrepancy between the two ends is what we want to measure.
Note: If the exhaust vent or damper is fully open, the temperature difference between the two readings is likely to be small. However, once you start closing your vent to half or a quarter, that difference becomes larger. We want to minimize that as much as possible.
Bake the cookies in the smoker, checking how they develop every 10 to 20 minutes. Make sure the cookies start to brown. If a pattern appears where the crackers are being cooked the most, that’s a good indication that the smoker area is producing the highest grill surface temperatures.
Why is that important? It’s entirely plausible that the center of your smoker is the hottest area, which we couldn’t detect with our dual probe.
Even though opposite ends of your smoker are reporting similar temperatures, YOU may still be fixing discrepancies in your cooking grates.
Install the panels
Your smoker may have rails to attach the plates to, but most models do not. Instead, your smoker’s barrel shape should allow the plates to fit together and sit a few inches off the bottom of the chamber.
Place the plates in your smoker one at a time, leaving only 1-2 cm between the plates.
Pro tip: Spread the dishes out a bit more in the areas where you’ve noticed higher cooking temperatures. This slightly softens the impact of the plates here, which has helped to equalize the cooking temperature over the entire surface of the smoker grates.
Take a second test
Do another boil test, again with temperature probes and biscuits. Cook the cookies again for another 10 to 20 minutes and watch your progress. If the cookies cook evenly this time, that IS. A good sign that all disruptive hotspots have been.
After that, if you’re happy with the panel’s performance, you should season your smoker to protect it from rust and wear.
Are there any disadvantages of smoking tuning plates?
While tuning plates are an excellent way to even out the surface temperature of your cooking grates when grilling, they tend to affect your smoker’s maximum temperature output.
In most cases, however, this should not be a problem. Grilling should occur naturally around the 107°C mark, and you shouldn’t go higher very often.
This could also be an issue if you want to turn up the temperature to quickly brown the food, but beyond that, using plates shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.
Writer & content creator. BBQ fanatic!
