The next morning I was up at 5 am and had the birds rinsed, stocking'd, and in the smoker a hour later. I put them in to dry for a hour at 110°, raised the temp to 125° at put the applewood chips on for four hours, then raised the temp to 140° and put in another pan of chips, dampers closed. After four hours I removed the chip pan, flipped the switch from 625 watts to 1250, and raised the temp to 185°
When I smoked four chickens like this s few weeks ago the entire process took anout 13 hours and I never had to raise the temp over the 185° mark to get the internal temperature of 162° for pull-off. With this load after 18 hours I raised the temp to 200°, and two hours later I jacked it up to 210° to finally attain a internal temp of 162°, total time in the smoker was 22.5 hours. I had no idea the extra load would require so much more time, finally had them resting on the counter and was able to crawl into bed at 4:30am.
I got up a couple hours later and threw the load of birds in the refrigerator, then went back to bed till ten. A little coffee and it was time to start processing some meat.
The great smoked flavor of these juicy birds had us snacking for brekky, only seven made it into the freezer.
I might have to stick to smoking four at a time in the future, I thought I'd have been done with the smoking 7-8 hours earlier. RAY
