My Pork Crown Roast experience with the Egg Genius

Dollinger

I'm basically a newbie on the egg although I've owned an egg for a long time. But shortly after I bought my egg, my life went to hell so basically I used it as an open charcoal grill to cook burgers and never really learned very much about it. Well now life finally getting back to normal so I going back and trying to learn to use the egg for what it was meant to do.

My wife always does a crown roast for Christmas dinner. This year for the first time ever, her whole family was over to our house for Christmas dinner. So I cooked the crown roast on the egg. It was supposed to be a big crown roast. But when she went to pick it up, it was only a small single loin roast. She she went to another store and bought a second crown roast. So now I had to cook two crown roast and they were different sizes so they would cook differently.

Now while I can now control the temperature pretty easily with just the dampers, I have the new Egg Genius which can also control the temperature and the provide the pit and meat temperature readings on my phone. 

So I cleaned out the egg all the way and put in BGE charcoal and fired up the egg with an electric starter. Once I had the fire established, I put the Egg genius on and set it up and let it finish bringing the egg up to temperature. While I waited for the egg to stabilize, I made a quick trip to the grocery store. While I was at the store, I monitored the pit temperature so I knew it was ready by the time I checked out. 

I put the roast on a rack with a drip pan. I setup for an indirect cook and placed the rack on the convector. I put the meat probes in and watch the meat come up to temperature. See photo. Now I had looked at all the recipes and post I could find on crown roast. The times stated varied widely from 2-4.5 hours so I didn't know what to expect. 

I watch the temperature of the meat come up steadily. To my surprise it came up in a couple of hours to target temperature.  So I took the meat off and put it in a warm oven to hold it because I wanted to cook a Malcolm Reed's sweet potato casserole. The casserole has mashed sweet potatoes in heavy cream with topped with pecans in a brown sugar and cinnamon vanilla topping. I added some Pendleton rye bourbon to the topping as well.

Here is what I learned. Upon checking on the meat I discovered that the meat on the outside was cooked to temperature but the inside of the crown was still raw. So I had to bring the oven up and finish the meat. This happened because I didn't think it through when I placed the probes and placed then from the outside into the meat instead of the inside. I should have placed on the inside and covered the outside with foil when it came up to temperature. For the sweet potato casserole, the bottom was caramelized too much. I should have placed something under the pan and used a deeper pan so it cooked more evenly.

As for the Egg Genius, it worked pretty well.  I placed a large binder clip on the side of the drip pan and clipped the pit probe to the handle of the binder clip which has much less mass so it actually measures the pit temperature and not the drip pan temperature. The egg genius worked well to control the temperature and it even easily brought the pit temperature up and down on command +- 50 degrees. It allowed me to monitor the cook inside while I was doing other things and controlled the temp so well I was free to be away from the egg with worry. I probably won't do an indirect cook without it. Posted are pics of the two cooks. When the lid opens, the air temp drops  so the pit temp reading (red line) drops. But you can see the meat temp come up to target. When the target was reached, the egg genius automatically adjusted the set temp to a keep warm temperature and texted - Meat is done lets eat!  On the Sweet Potato casserole (bottom Pic), the cook is between the yellow. It smelled so good, people kept opening opening the dome so the pit temperature reading isn't steady.

theyolksonyou

Nice write.  Glad things are going your way. Now, where are the food pics?  

Dollinger

Sorry but I forgot to make pics. I only have this one and only crown left.

theyolksonyou

Busting on ya