I got all excited the other day when I took delivery of the first Pheonix Kamado smoker. A lot of friends use them and I'd only ever smoked on offset smokers so I was eager to try the new gear.
I bought a beautiful big Tomahawk Steak from our local butcher and applied some yellow mustard and the beautiful Butchers Axe Big Bark rub. I preheated the Kamado to 250f/120c with our Mallee Root Charcoal and a Natural Smoke wood chunk, and fill with excitement, started my first reverse sear in this smoker.
A supplier sent us a new thermometer to use as a sample so I was happy to use this for the first time too. Wifey loves a rare steak so after 90 odd minutes the Tomahawk was saying 125f/60c. I pulled it out and lightly wrapped it in foil while opening up the vents on the Kamado to bring the temps up to sear it. I'd been filming the cook for content for our Instagram page as well and spent the waiting time editing a really funky reel to upload and I was so excited to make something awesome. But..
I don't know if the thermometer was under-reading or I should've cranked the kamado more, or even a combination of both, but as you can see in the photo below, a good vet could've bought this cow back to life!
The Butcher's Axe Big Bark was amazing, as it always is but for me, this was way under done. Even wifey wasn't stoked with it. A much smarter man than me once gave me the sage advice about not trying to many new things at once so if something doesn't work, you can isolate what the problem is. It would have been nice if he'd added something about trying multiple new things on a $68 piece of meat too! I cooked a beautiful scotch fillet on it the next day, to make sure I hadn't forgotten how to cook a steak. Pulling it out at 135f/57, I used my usual Inkbird wireless thermometer and a much hotter sear, it was beautiful.
Some days your the hammer, some days you're the nail.