Clean MES?

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snot00011

Smoke Blower
Original poster
Aug 5, 2013
84
16
Seattle
So I'm trying to figure out if I need to clean out my MES and how to do it or if I should even do it. There is a smell that's hard to explain, but I feel like that's how my chicken smells after it comes out the smoker. Any suggestions or comments would be great.


 
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I like to keep the glass clean so I can look inside.

Also clean the racks, drip pan, water pan, & chip tray.

As far as the walls just leave them alone.

That buildup is the smoker seasoning & that's what makes the food taste so good.

Hint: If you foil the water pan, & drip pan it makes cleanup real easy.

Al
 
That's not bad at all. Like Al said, grates, refoil the water, chip try and drip pan. Leave the rest alone. If that has a glass door (hard to tell from the pic) you should clean it after every smoke.
 
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LA Awesome cost a dollar a bottle and can be found at the Dollar General stores. Spray it on and let it set for a few minutes and the grease will generally wipe right off. Cheap biodegradable product that works better than anything I've ever tried.   
 
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Well I'm stumped. I have no idea what the smell could be at this point. I think I would just clean everything at this point and then run the temp to 275 for 5 or 6 hours, let it cool and start over with the seasoning.
 
I Clean my MES with a Bucket, some warm water, put that in the bucket with some dish soap, then a Dollar store steel wool dish cleaner, sponge and one of those sponges covered with a web of scrubber material and water hose are the only thing, beside a Little elbow grease, I use to clean my smoker.
 
Wow, your "before" pictures shows the cleanest smoker I've ever seen. Perhaps you are keeping it too clean? All commercial smokers have layers of black stuff that have built up. This is also true of commercial pizza ovens. I think this "patina" is part of the secret of producing great-tasting product. Even after only a dozen smokes, my smoker's walls were almost black. Here's video of what they looked like back five months ago, when I'd had it for three months:

Smoker Interior

If I took the same video today, all you would see would be pure black.

That said, I too have definitely had the unpleasant experience of having the smell from a previous salmon smoke "infect" my next smoke. My solution is what has already been suggested: crank up the smoker to max temp and let her cook empty for 3-4 hours.

Like you, I did initially obsess about keeping the walls clean, but I slowly lost that war. Short of using oven cleaner, I have no idea how I could get things clean down to the metal now.

However, I want the thing to function, so in addition to wiping it down after each smoke to remove loose debris, and cleaning the drip pans (easy since I foil both the drip and water pans), I do clean the racks, the rack supports, and the vent, the latter to keep it functional. My latest discovery is that my ultrasonic cleaner makes these chores trivially easy. See this post:

Ultrasonic Cleaning
 
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