The Smoker Strikes Again!

I have just finished cleaning up from yet another attempt to clean my electric smoker.  Here is my story.

I read online that a great way to clean the racks and pieces from inside your smoker was to place them inside your oven and then use the self cleaning function.  This sounded like a good idea, and this morning I decided to try it.  I figured that there would be some smoke since the racks were coated with pork fat and drippings.  Oh yes, there was smoke!  It began to blow out of the vent in the front of the oven.  At first as a small wisp and then it quickly grew to a Tank laying down a defensive smoke screen!  I only saw the wisp before I was racing around the house opening windows and setting up a fan blowing out a downstairs window.

I came back into the kitchen after making my rounds of window opening only to be greeted by a wall of smoke that practically obscured the entire downstairs!  At this point I decided that this was way over the top and made my way to the front of the oven where I attempted to turn it off.  In the thick jet of acrid smoke I pressed buttons while hacking up a lung.  No change in the oven.  Fan still running.  The now dreaded CLN symbol shown through the blast of dark grey stench.  Fuck It!  I must shut-off the power to this beast!  I race to the garage and attempt to figure out which breaker will do the trick.

I enter the house again and it is crazy smokey!  I make my way back to the oven and the CLN is now gone and the smoke is only rising from the vent instead of blowing out sideways.  I can not open the door and remove the producers of this smoke however because the oven is still auto-locked.

Half an hour later I have vented the house and I can get the racks out of the oven.  I come back and realize that the glass inside the oven door is black.  Baked on like a coat of paint, can't see anything through it, like it is no longer glass but a hunk of solid metal kind of BLACK!

I have started the cleaning cycle again in hopes of clearing the glass but I'm thinking I might need some maximum strength oven cleaner to accomplish this sometime later.

The good news is that the smoker racks, once banged against some rocks, shed all of their nasty grease and are really quiet clean!

Was it worth it?  HELL NO!

Now you may have noticed in the title of this tale... The Smoker Strikes Again!  What happened the first time?  Let me tell ya.

Again, the internet.  Again, a great idea for cleaning the racks.  Put them in the dishwasher they said.  They'll come out spotless.

Not only did the the racks come out looking exactly as disgusting as when they went in, every surface inside the dishwasher was coated by a kind of grease I could only describe as "black lard".  You could literally write your name in it!  It took an hour to wipe it out... and then the inside was only gray with grease!

Let's not forget to mention the smell: Just like a rack of perfectly smoked ribs!  And that smell lasted for weeks as each cycle of the dishwasher slowly broke down the grease and odor until it returned to normal.

I tried twice and I am done.  A very wise man once told me that Napoleon Dynamite was the dumbest movie ever made.  This same wise man told me that you should never clean your smoker.  In my opinion, he was dead right both times!