The wife is out of town for a few days so I've been doing some experiments with the BBQ smoker. I used whatever meat we had laying around, which was specialty (garlic and basil) sausages from Woolies (i.e. Woolworths - a supermarket), some pre-processed (fresh, not frozen) hamburger patties from Aldi (a different supermarket), and some regular ground beef. I used some whiskey/oak smoking wood (private recipe) and some alder branches from around the yard and did a slow cook of about 6 hours.
Results:
Ground beef: excellent, primo, divine
Aldi hamburger patties: fail
Woolies specailty sausages: fail
The moral of this story is to take pre-processed meat and chuck it in the bin. It's really truly garbage and nothing can redeem it.