Joe Carroll - The Artisanal Kitchen : Lessons and Recipes for Superior Smoking and Grilling.

Also in This Series

The Artisanal Kitchen: Perfect Pasta

The Artisanal Kitchen: Perfect Pizza at Home

The Artisanal Kitchen: Vegetables the Italian Way

The Artisanal Kitchen: Holiday Cocktails

The Artisanal Kitchen: Holiday Cookies

The Artisanal Kitchen: Party Food

The Artisanal Kitchen: Baking for Breakfast

The Artisanal Kitchen: Party Cakes

The Artisanal Kitchen: Sweets & Treats

The Artisanal Kitchen: Perfect Homemade Ice Cream

Contents

Introduction

T his book is a straightforward approach to smoking and grilling, with key lessons and, of course, mouthwatering recipes to help you apply what youve learned. Live-fire cooking is pretty simple, but it relies on a real understanding of how smoke, fire, and ingredients interact, as well as on conscientious and informed shopping.

Amazing food can be cooked on almost any kind of equipment if you know how to build and maintain a fire, are able to get high-quality ingredients, and can master time and temperature. This book will teach you the importance of wood as fuel and the many shapes and forms it can take. And it will show you how great meals begin at the butcher shop and farmers market.

Finally, one of best things about live-fire cooking is the sense of celebration that comes with it. With this book, you can create a range of smoky and grilled meats that will satisfy any palate, as well as side dishes to round out the table. My hope is that whether you want to smoke a better brisket or experiment with some uncommon barbecue (pulled goat leg, perhaps?), youll absorb these live-fire lessons and recipes and then adapt them to your own style. Happy cooking!

Smoked

M eat + smoke + patience = barbecue. You need only these three things to make the best slow-smoked meat youve ever tasted. Barbecue is a relatively simple process once you know where to focus your attention.

Choosing the best meat is by far the most important step in achieving barbecue greatness (see ). Once you learn to select the right meat and wood for whatever youre smoking, youre ready to choose your equipment. The style of smoker you use will automatically inform your choice of primary fuel: gas, charcoal, or hardwood logs. In this chapter, I take you through your options and, I hope, convince you that less is more, both in price and complexity of equipment.

Once you have your smoker, Ill show you how to set it up for barbecuing, and how to monitor and maintain your cue throughout the low-and-slow process. After that, youre ready to choose your first barbecue adventure from the recipes that begin .

Choosing a Smoker

I taught myself how to barbecue in my backyard with a $40 Brinkmann smoker, which continues to turn out some of the best meat Ive ever smoked. You can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a fancy high-end smoker, but all youre paying for is convenience and, perhaps, some badass-looking equipmentbut certainly not flavor.

Electric Smokers

An electric smoker is the easiest to use: you plug it in, set the temperature, load your meat, and let the machine do its work; all you have to do is add some wood chips periodically. What youll end up with is, yes, technically, barbecue, but its almost impossible to create a thick, flavorful bark in an electric smoker, and you can forget about a smoke ring (see ). Simply put, electric smokers dont produce the combustion needed to create the flavor of authentic barbecue.

Propane Smokers

Propane smokers are as easy to use as electric smokers but are much more portable. As with a gas grill, theres no charcoal fire to attend to, and you can achieve something close to barbecue flavor. But, as with gas grills, something very important is missing: wood.

Pellet Smokers

Like electric and gas smokers, pellet smokers offer accurate temperature control and require only minimal babysitting during the smoking process. These grill-like rigs burn small cylinders of compressed sawdust to produce a constant output of smoke. While pellet smokers have their fans and are great for cold-smoking, Ive found them to produce less smokeand therefore less flavorthan even electric and gas smokers.

Charcoal Smokers

Consistent temperature is a convenience, but whats lacking in all of the models mentioned above is charcoal. While fresh wood, whether in the form of chips, pellets, or chunks, adds flavor, carbonized woodthat is, charcoalis equally essential to achieving maximum barbecue flavor.

Most charcoal smokers fall into one of two categories: offset or bullet-shaped. Offset smokers look like a grill with a small firebox attached to one side. The heat and smoke produced in the firebox flow through the barrel-shaped chamber and out through a chimney. Its easier to build and maintain a fire in this style of smoker, but Ive found that theyre very inconsistent. Its hard to control the flow of smoke, which tends to float above the meat and exit the chimney before its done its job. Plus, the side of the chamber near the firebox gets much hotter than the opposite side, so the meat will cook unevenly unless you move it around.

My favorite type of smoker is the bullet-shaped barrel smoker. Most models resemble a kettle grill with a long metal tube fixed between the bowl-shaped bottom and the domed lid. The setup for all of these smokers is basically the same: Charcoal and wood go in a pan on the bottom of the grill and then are added through a small door as needed. A water pan is set above the charcoal and below two or more racks to hold the meat. On top goes the lid, which usually has air vents and a thermometer. The most popular barrel smoker on the market is probably the Weber Smokey Mountain (see ), which comes in three sizes. The cheaper Brinkmann smoker is similar in form and function, but it lacks the Webers adjustable air vents and has a smaller door, which makes adding charcoal and wood more of a pain. It also has a rather vague temperature gauge on the lid (with low, medium, and hot zones) in lieu of an actual thermometer. (With any smoker, I recommend using an accurate oven thermometer or instant-read probe thermometer to monitor the temperature until you calibrate the built-in thermometer to your desired cooking range.)

But you dont actually need a dedicated smoker to make proper barbecue. A kettle grill can easily be configured into a smoker and will achieve equally great results once you know how to set one up (see ).

My advice: If youre new to barbecue, start with an inexpensive bullet smoker (see ). If you catch the barbecue bug after using it for a while, upgrade to something that suits your particular needs (capacity, speed, convenience, etc.). Just remember that if you opt for convenience over charcoal, youre also leaving out flavor.

Setting Up and Using a Charcoal Smoker

If you have a charcoal smoker, congratulations! Your barbecue is going to taste great. Now its time to start smoking. (See for step-by-step photos.)

Remove any ash and debris if the smoker has been previously used and clean the grates.