Cooking advice for New BGE rookie

Welcome to the forum! A tenderloin is fairly lean and will cook quickly direct at 400 and have good flavor. A 2.8 lb tenderloin is pretty large I think. If it were me I would cook it direct with chips at 400 and pull at 130 internal. Turn the loin as it cooks to crisp up the outside. My guess it will take about 1/2 hour to cook. You could do your taters at the same time.

Cooking a tenderloin low indirect will probably yield a dry, tough result. Others may disagree and you certainly need to weigh all opinions. :ermm:

Ron,

Welcome to the forum and congrats on your new Egg. In regard to your roast:

I'm assuming you mean a beef tenderloin... first, here's a link to a ribeye roast about the same size that I did last week. You should get some ideas from this.

http://www.fearlesskitchen.com/2010/04/recipe-smoked-ribeye-roast-guest-post-from-fearless-grill.html

In terms of your planned technique:

Cooking at 250-275 to get smoke in makes sense. You may want to sear the meat too to get a bit of char on the outside. You can either do this 1st (as in my ribeye roast) or at the end of the cook. If you try and do it at the end, be careful removing the hot plate setter, and you'll need to pull the roast about 10 degrees lower than your desired finish temp to do this.

Your egg setup is correct - plate setter legs up with grate on top. Unless you choose to cook the potatoes in the drip pan (see below), you don't particularly need the rack on the grate. Just put the drip pan in the plate setter before putting the grate on. If you do this, put a bit of water (not a lot) in the pan to prevent the initial drippings from burning.

Light your charcoal in several spots. Your Egg will come up to temp faster, and you have less chance of your fire going out. Not as important on a quick cook like this, but will be a good habit to get into when you start doing longer cooks.

How you distribute the chips doesn't really matter - lighting the fire in several spots will provide more contact between chips and coals, which should give you better smoke production.

In terms of cook temp / time, you should think about cooking meat in terms of internal temp, not time. For medium rare, I would pull at an internal temp of 125-130, and allow to rest under foil for 10-15 minutes to bring the final temp to a range of 130-135.


In regard to the potatoes, there are several things you can do, including:

1) If you're willing to forgo crispy, put some potatoes, water, seasonings, and fresh herbs into a foil packet, with some slices of butter if you want, and cook for 60-90 minutes alongside your tenderloin.

2) Stick with your rack in drip pan idea, but put the potatoes in the drip pan to bake and mix with the drippings from the roast. While the roast is resting, open up your vents, cranking up the heat in your BGE, crisping the potatoes a bit.

Hope this helps, and good luck,

-John

My reply was for pork tenderloin. Beef suggestion is right on!