A Day of Firsts (Pic Heavy)

Nice recovery.

On low and slows, I usually start low and through the cook ramp up, adjusted to meet my desired time (usually 1-3  hours before eating, and maybe earlier if there are other things I need the egg for).

I think this is what I wished someone told me when I started out:  When the smoke is good, you can put the meat on, regardless of temp.  The temperature at any given time is meaningless in terms of the entire cook over a period of many hours.

In quasi-scientific terms, the cook needs a certain amount of energy to complete.  Like watt-hours.  If you were to plot time vs temp, the area (integration of the plot of time/temp) over the entire cook represents the energy (watt-hours) to cook the food.  Although it may vary - for example powering through a stall reduces the total energy to cook the food - the general concept is solid.

So you can throw it on when you overshot your temp.  Think about what's happening the first 20 minutes....that meat comes up to room temp and inches up to body temp.  The extra hot egg (hopefully cooling down) isn't doing anything weird to the meat.  Just heating it up faster. 

Sorry about the diatribe...btw.  Learn, and these are sorta obvious, what happens with time and temp.   Lower temp cooks can't keep up with the evaporative cooling effect of th  meat.  So in this case you get a stall.  Also you loose more moisture with the stall in a lower temp cook over a faster cook, but that's ok, and all this can be more forgiving no matter what you do to a certain degree if you have a very fatty piece of meat with plenty of connective tissue.

Things get interesting at higher temps and your meat is hot on the outside.  Keep in mind, the temp in the egg only touches the outside of the meat.   Hotter temps increase the temp rise after you pull off - big wave of heat running through the meat.   The rate of collagen breakdown changes the final temp of the meat at different temps.  High (turbo) cooks will finish at higher temps than low temp low and slows.  Fat renders differently at different temps. 

My philosophy is to learn what temps and other various changes do, and I use that general knowledge to tweak the cooking parameters so I'm never surprised about what I'm cooking and have options to control my schedule and deal with different rubs and characteristics.