The Three-Meat Plate: BBQ Classic made easy with Smoke X™
The three-meat plate is an iconic BBQ joint dish. It solves the problem of choosing between favorites and gives you a variety of flavors and textures to enjoy throughout your meal. But why settle for this bounteous plate, this carne-copia, only when you’re at a restaurant? For far less money than you’d spend for a family at a smokehouse, you can create the three-meat plate at home!
Does that sound like a major project? It’s not! In fact, we did it twice this week in the middle of our workdays (for research purposes, of course). With the right tools, like Smoke X4™, it’s super easy. Here, we’ll give you a rundown on why this fantastic instrument is perfect for a big cook like this, and walk you through a rough timeline for making a mountain of meat at home, all in the space of about 4 hours.
Smoke X4 is perfect for cooking a three-meat plate
With all those delicious meats on the smoker all at the same time, it’s handy to have a tool that can handle them all at once. Enter Smoke X4. Let’s break down its advantages before we get to the logistics of this cook.
Probes
First, Smoke X4 has four probe channels (hence the name), so you can track everything from one meter, with no need for multiple bases.
Plus, there’s also a wide range of probes. BBQ isn’t a one-size-fits-all art form, and the wide range of Pro-Series® probes (all of which are compatible with Smoke X4) give you the ability to customize your cook.
We love using the 2.5″ High Temp Needle probe for tracking our rib cook, but you can choose others that suit your needs.
Built-in display, no app
We love our smart devices, but we don’t want to have to use them. Getting cooking is easy and fast: just put the meat in the smoker, stick a probe in it, and set the alarm temp right on the device. You’re not dependent on your phone battery and you won’t have to wait for a firmware update. The included receiver lets you see the temp without opening an app, and we love that simplicity.
Range
One of Smoke X4’s great features is its range. You can carry your receiver with you throughout the house or set it up where you will hear it, and you don’t need to leave anything within Bluetooth™ range of your cook. We brought it inside and kept it at a desk while we worked on other things.
This feature becomes even better when it’s rainy or snowy outside and you don’t want to leave a smart device out in the weather to communicate with your thermometer.
Battery life
With a 330-hour battery life (when using the two AA-size batteries it runs on) Smoke X4 is ready for any cook you can throw at it without fear of dying. And with the optional DC adapter, you don’t have to worry about it at all. This four-hour cook won’t even be an afterthought!
Run a fan
With Smoke X4, you don’t just monitor your smoker temp, you can actually control it. If you’re not on a pellet cooker, you can connect the Billows® BBQ Temperature Control Fan. This cook is going to take about 4 hours, so there’s little chance of running out of fuel, but you want to make sure the temp is staying as close as possible to 275°F (135°C).
Making the three-meat plate
Getting a three-meat plate to the table with everything hot and juicy is a matter of timing. We chose to cook everything at 275°F (135°C), which works well and gets you to dinner in as little as four hours. You can cook yours at a lower temp, which can be nice if you’re particularly interested in a smokier flavor.
Start cooking your ribs
First, we preheated our smoker—using our air probe to monitor the temp—then we prepped our ribs. A good coating of something with a little spice is our preference, but go as sweet or garlicky or “just-salt-and-pepper” as you like. Get your ribs on the smoker and put a needle probe in between two of the bones in the meatiest section. You can set the high-temp alarm on your rib channel for 203°F (95°C). (We know, that’s a little higher than we have recommended ribs in the past. But this cook isn’t about creating “competition” style ribs, this is about home-style BBQ done right, and many championship pitmasters cook their ribs to fall-off-the-bone in their own backyards.) Cook them for about 2.5 hours before wrapping them.
Add the chicken
In the meantime prep your chicken—if you didn’t season it last night to give it a long dry brine, that is. We’re using chicken leg quarters for this, and you should, too. Breast meat dries out too easily and just isn’t that great for smoking. Leg quarters (or thighs or drumsticks) have the collagen stores needed to keep the chicken juicy as it cooks past the dry point for breast meat. Give it a good seasoning all over with whatever you like and toss them in the smoker about 2 hours after you started the ribs. Insert another probe into one of the larger quarters and set the high-temp alarm for 195°F (91°C). (That’s not overcooked for chicken legs!) Close the lid and keep smoking.
Wrap the ribs
After 2.5 hours, it’s time to wrap the ribs. Take out the probe, give them a good swaddling in a couple layers of foil, stick the needle probe back in, and keep cooking for another half hour.
Unwrap the ribs, get the sausage cooking
After the half-hour has passed, unwrap the ribs. This will let the bark resolidify and dry out excess surface moisture. Again, put the needle probe back in between the bones. There’s a good chance you will have reached the doneness temperature on the ribs during the wrapped cook, and unwrapped cook will actually pull heat from the inside of them, cooling them to about 195°F (91°C).
This is also when you want to put the sausage on the smoker. Insert a short probe, like the 2.5-inch Straight Penetration Probe, into the end of one of your sausages and set the high-temp alarm for that channel to 160°F (71°C). We’re in the home stretch now. One more half hour (maybe 40 minutes) and we should be there.
Verify temps, pull, and eat
By the time the sausage comes to temp, the chicken should be just about right—between 185 and 195°F (85 and 91°C)—and the ribs will be perfect. Verify that the sausage has come to temp using your Thermapen® ONE, and while you’re at it, check a few chicken quarters to see if they’re all up to temperature.
Now it’s time to pile everything on a sheet tray, take it to the table, and get to eating! With tools like Smoke X4, a BBQ feast like this is easy to pull off without stress and without worry. The right tools let you focus more on the why you cook instead of the how. It’s for the joy of eating incredible food and sharing it with the people around you. So grab a couple slabs, a few chicken quarters, and a pack of sausages and make a feast that’s done just the way you like!
Shop now for products used in this post:
Are Thermo Works 2.5″ Pro Series Needle Probe, air Probe w/ Grate Clip and High Temp 2.5″ Straight Penetration Probes compatibe with The big Green Egg Genius temperature control device c/w fan?
They are not. Each thermometer unit is designed for certain resistances/voltages that are engineered into their own probes. Our probes will not work well with their thermometers and their probes will not work well in ours.
sounds good except, why put the probe into the ribs before wrapping?
At the beginning? So we can watch when the stall starts.