Perfect Smoked Beef Roast

Feeling guilty about allowing my smoker grill being left idle for a few weekends, I decided to prepare a round roast yesterday. That proved to be the best decision I've made on a weekend in quite some time! The roast turned out absolutely perfect!

Yesterday was a "catch up on everything that's been put off" kind of day, so there was only time late in the day to "putz and fuss" with the smoker. I elected to pre-cook the roast in the over and then finish it off on the smoker for the lastt 3 hours. That just might be the trick to this whole smoker thing . . . hard to argue with the results obtained this way.

I covered the beef roast with some cooking oil, applied a dry rub (garlic powder, onion powder, Old Bay "blackened" spice, and a few sprinkles of celery seed), set the roast "fat side down" in a disposable brownie pan, covered the pan with foil, and baked it in the oven at 200 degrees for 6 hours.

I fired up the sidebox of the smoker (charcoal and oak chucks) and got the smoker's main chamber up to 180 degrees before introducing the roast. I removed the foil cover on the pan and put the pan and roast on main chamber's bottom grill near the mouth of the side box. I turned the roast several times to insure the smoke flavor was evenly distributed over the surface of the roast. I used cherry wood chips for the smoke. At the one hour-to-go mark, I added 1/2 stick of butter and raw onion rings to the pan.

My wife and her family aren't big smoked-anything fans . . . but this roast was a huge hit! When my father-in-law says: "this is really good", a fellow knows he's found the right combination of spices and smoke flavor. I suppose what impressed me most was the fact that this roast could be carved down in very thin slices yet was moist and tender enough to break with the edge of a fork . . . now, that's a damn near perfect beef roast. One other tweak I tried for the first time - after removing the roast from the grill, I tented it with foil for about 10 minutes before carving it. My sister-in-law arrived late, so I did this out of necessity, but am convinced that there really is something to the notion of tenting meet prior to carving.