The iGrill has been on my wish list for some time now, and my wife was gracious enough to stuff my stocking with it this year. If you're not familiar with it, the iGrill is a tool / app to monitor food temperature while grilling, linking via Bluetooth to your iPhone or iPad. I was very excited to try it out, especially as a data geek since it graphs the temperatures and has different tools to share your grilling experience.
Tonight's meal was my old standby, the Grilled Salmon Stuffed With Crab. I mean, I've done it so many times, how could it *possibly* go wrong?
After prepping the salmon fillets as I normally do, I inserted the two thermometers and synced the iPad.
Since they'd been marinating in the refrigerator for most of the day, they started off pretty cold.
It started off great - the graphs were charting the temperatures fine, I was able to set the type of meat, the target temperature, and a timer / alarm for when I wanted to put the asparagus on the grill.
Everything was going fine, when all of a sudden the probes stopped working. I thought the Bluetooth needed to be refreshed, so I picked up the iPad and was about to go to the settings menu, when the "food is ready" alarm went off, and the temperature showed over 300 degrees within a couple of seconds!
I looked outside and saw smoke billowing out of the grill, much more than normal. I lifted the hood to find that the alder plank had caught on fire!
I was thoroughly aggravated, especially since I had them soak for several hours that day. (In fact, I just remembered that I have metal plank guards that would've prevented this that I should've used.)
I guess I just had the burners on too high.
So, I removed the probes, transferred the fillets to a baking sheet and finished cooking them. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the probes to start working again so I wasn't able to use the iGrill for the remainder of the grilling time. I had to use my old-fashioned digital meat thermometer instead. =o(
Below, you can see below the huge jump in temperature when the board caught fire. The gaps are where the probes failed to register.
Sooooo... this round was more a "blackened salmon" entry, as you can see...
But I was able to cover it with a garnish.
It still tasted fine, but I missed the smoky flavor that would've been there had they been on the board the entire time. =o9
