Lockdown Cuisine Thread

Awesome baby back ribs tonight. Rubbed 8 pounds of ribs with the Peach-B-Q dry rub from the Loveless Cafe in Nashville TN. Let them gradually come up near room temperature, allowing the rub to soak in a bit. Set the smoker to 225*F and got the apple wood chips smoking. Put the ribs in the smoker for 2 hours. At that point I wrapped the ribs in aluminum foil and returned them to the smoker for 2 more hours, still at 225*. At that point I added just a few more wood chips and unwrapped the ribs. The last hour I basted every 20 minutes with Peach BBQ Sauce, again from The Loveless Cafe.

Incredibly moist, tender, flavorful ribs. I'm glad I found this 2-2-1 method for smoking them.

 

Welp, the one I bought in April 2020 has, since early 2025 (so after nearly five years of daily use), been exhibiting an especially vexing intermittent failure mode: when it happens, the heater keeps being ON when the ECU means to cycle it OFF.

Wouldn't be my first choice of failure mode. At least I know there are two remaining fail-safes (a resettable overtemperature interrupt on the bottom of the cavity, and a non-resettable one a bit higher up). And the higher-calibrated of the two pressure switches acts by directly cutting the heater power, so that's like a third fail-safe whenever I'm cooking something with water and the lid on. (And of course the lid itself has two independent overpressure safeties.)

So most of this year I've been using this one to cook only things with water and the lid on, that I won't consider ruined if they get unintendedly pressure-cooked a bit. And using the newer Instant Pot for other stuff. And the dodgy one's plugged into a power strip I can turn off when not using it. (The Instant Pot manual explicitly wants you to have it unplugged whenever you're not using it. I wonder how many people do that?)

My first suspicion was the relay sticking, but I couldn't square that with the pot usually being well-behaved again after unplugging it and plugging it back in. So I started looking harder at the electronics, and for several months now I've had it instrumented with a couple added LEDs (one on the ECU output to the relay driver transistor, and one on the actual driver output to the relay). The intermittent, once-in-a-blue-moon nature of the glitch has been making it a puzzle to track down.

But it is, at last, becoming less intermittent (more than once in one morning, even) and the heater is definitely staying powered even when both LEDs are dark. And a couple times now, after unplugging and plugging in again, the heater is still powered. So I guess I'm back to suspecting the relay.

Sometimes after unplugging and plugging in again, the heater will be immediately powered, but I still hear a faint click when the ECU wants to turn the relay on, and then the next time the ECU output turns off, the relay does turn off. So it seems like intermittent sticking, where even the little wiggle from the relay drive toggling on and off again can sometimes dislodge it.

The one other possibility I might have to eliminate is that the driver board could somehow be failing in a way that puts a different voltage across the relay when it's supposed to be off; the test light I added is an LED, so it wouldn't show me if somehow a reverse voltage is ending up there, but the relay would still respond.

So I guess next I'll add some test points to hang a multimeter there, and make sure it isn't showing any weird-nice-person voltage on the relay coil when it should be off. If that's the case, I guess I'll go relay shopping.

 

That's what all small appliance manuals want you to do.

 

the kid's tight. Throw some baby backs in there according to their recipe? You'll never go back. I think that's the best use - though a close 2nd is for making / fermenting wine.
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Are "baby backs" a kind of ribs? My wife does steamed garlic, pork spare ribs, but in our larger, canning pressure cooker. About an hour, and they're just falling off the bones.

 

They are the short ones at the back of the pig. The instapot basically Cooks them up and then the final few minutes is a quick flashing under the broiler. Yes, you know they're perfect as they fall off the bone.