So I took the plunge and bought Weber’s iGrill2 for my first ever brisket experience and it turned out to be a critical purchase!

We had a bunch of people coming over for Braai Day celebrations, it was the day we launched Rate my Braai, and with co-founder Tank Lanning looking on, failure was quite simply not an option.

As most of you know, it’s all about temperatures with a brisket. You either focus on the ambient temp or the meat temp – if you’re like me, you’ll focus on both and this is where the iGrill really shone.

Set it up, pair it to your phone, choose what you want to cook and away you go!

Sounds pretty simple and to be fair, it is. Temperatures are set on the app and the probes do their job nicely – you even get a nice alert on the main unit or your phone when you’re under or above the desired number. Very clever and it really did the job for my brisket. As soon as it hit 91°C / 196°F, off it came.

However, the same couldn’t be said for a 1Kg T-Bone we got from Hussar Grill that Tank and I had the pleasure of cooking recently.

You’ll have seen the pictures on Twitter, and you may well have even cooked one yourself, but if you haven’t, the one thing to be aware of is the sheer girth! It’s an enormous piece of meat and it needs time to cook properly – more time than we’re used to when doing steak. With that in mind, we decided to give the iGrill2 another go. Probes in, app open, medium rare T-Bone selected, pre-set temp of 54°C / 129°F.

So far so good.

So as the beer went down, the meat temperature went up, and we pulled both T-Bones off at 54°C / 129°F.

It was a massive error. Why? Because Weber’s pre-set medium rare temp of 54°C / 129°F makes absolutely no allowance for a solid resting period on a steak this size. Both T-Bones continued to go up by a further 6 degrees putting it very firmly into the “Medium” category. Of course, with the bone-in, it’s hardly surprising that the temperatures rose fairly quickly and as we sat there watching the numbers go up and up, we had to make the call: Hit the tragic “Well done” mark, or cut short our resting time and get carving!

What was the issue? Well, for starters, we had factually overcooked two tremendous 1Kg T-Bones that quite frankly deserved to be braai’ed correctly. Granted, they were still incredibly tender and fairly pink in the middle but they weren’t as they should have been. One could argue that this was perhaps our fault and we should have known better – fair enough and I tend to agree. However, my gripe is also with Weber. I strongly dispute their pre-set temperature suggestion for T-Bones given applicable resting times. We absolutely should have pulled those steaks off at 48°C / 118°F and let them rest until they had reached the correct medium rare temp.

Weber alerts you when it thinks it is time to take the meat off the braai. In this particular case, it should have alerted us much earlier. You learn from these kinds of mistakes and I can promise that we’ll never make the same one again – in fact, we’ll probably never use it again for T-Bones and rather go with our guts, like we’ve done all our lives!!