Charcoal Grill / Smoker

Well, my birthday was celebrated two days early to accommodate everyone’s work schedules, so on Sunday morning, I ate a fine brunch with my wife, daughter, son and his lovely girlfriend, all seated around the back-yard table. After the B-day cards were opened and laughed over, the gifts came out-first four beautifully wrapped bags of wood chips (Mesquite and Hickory) which made sense given my love of flavored-smoke barbecuing, and then… a box containing a fitted cover for, now get this, a fire box-equipped Brinkmann Grill/Smoker!

The Dragon Sleeps






I sat in rare silence for a few seconds, letting rapidly fading grey cells make the connection, then gasped and tearily grinned while my bear of a son hefted the huge crate out to tableside. The bi-lingual instruction book was a bit daunting, so I declined Ursa Not-So-Minor’s offer to help me assemble it right then and asked him instead to lug it back inside.


A quick aside now to again thank the little people who made real the dream of this closeted suburban-patioed Grill Master wannabee: Sarah and Daniel who have surmounted my parenting, Dot for furthering that process in Daniel, Amanda who has been charming, funny and unobtrusive, and most of all-Debra, whose patience and love sustain me in all things.
You will all, from this time on, be subjected to more smoked foods than anyone should eat.


Marco & Jennifer, our neighbors, came down later with young Evander, whom we refer to as our Starter Grandchild. Marco generously, and a bit hungrily, I thought, offered to assist in the next day’s assembling of the smoke belching Leviathan which Vegetarian Jennifer eyed warily. She doubtless feared the clouds of second-hand meat smoke filling their apartment. Maybe eucalyptus branches from time to time?


Next day dawned overcast and I, impatient and fearing rain, decided not to wait for Marco to return from work, dragged the crate back out to the yard, laid down cardboard to prevent scratches, and took the first bite of the elephant. The instructions called for the work of two people but with much strain, balancing and several wrong turns, I was able to have the grill on its legs and 85% done when Marco came down to help finish the job. His aid, trouble-shooting and his sharp second set of eyes were a big help. I covered the grill, went about my day and was awakened later that night by a tremendous rain and thunder storm.


When the city dried off, I went about curing (tempering and cleansing paint fumes, etc, left from its manufacturing and storage) the fire box and cooking chamber. Curing required 11.5 lbs of charcoal and 3 hours of heating, maintaining two different sequential temperatures, and then several hours of cooling. Despite starting at what I thought was a reasonably early hour, my Inaugural Meal was pulled from the grill later that summer evening with the aid of a flashlight.

                                                  Duplex Chicken Legs


Chicken Legs seemed a good choice for smoking in what was really an experiment to determine how the grill worked and what to expect in the future. In addition to being economical, a small loss in case of catastrophe, it was also a dish I’d cooked many times on my old grill and it had the added benefit of not involving a great many steps where variations might skew the data gathered. When experimenting with food, K.I.S.S.
After brining the leg quarters in a salt/garlic/peppercorn/Adobo solution I rinsed and dried them well and rubbed them with a Cajun Seasoning developed at the Empire Diner. I had soaked two handfuls of Mesquite chips in water, drained them and wrapped them in double-thickness aluminum foil. The packets were then perforated five or six times each to allow smoke to escape and tossed onto the ash-covered coals in the fire box. The legs were placed on the cooking chamber grates nearest the fire box; three on the cooking grates and the other three directly above them on the warming grate. This duplex cooking let me place all the meat as close to the heat/smoke source as possible assuring more even cooking times for all of them.


SmokeStack




None of the six websites I read suggested precise cooking times and the given range of temperatures ran from 150° to 275°. Ever the Gemini, I opted for about 225°- low enough to give the smoke time to do its magic and

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Looking Good

high enough to allow us to eat sometime that same night. I hoped for the best and was rewarded with thoroughly cooked, moist, lightly smoked legs with caramelized bits of spice and the usual chewy skin and novice-scaring pink interior that comes not from undercooking (they reached 170° on my trusty digital thermometer) but from both brining and smoking. Think about the pink meat of smoked ham or of brined corned beef and pastrami. My only quibble was that the smoke flavor though just right to Debra’s palate was not as strong as I’d aimed for. It was when cleaning the cooled ashes the next morning that I found the source of the problem; the foil I’d wrapped the wood chips in was not as thick as it might have been and so disintegrated soon after coming into contact with the hot coals. This accounted for the short heavy burst of smoke I’d seen after closing the grill. The resulting smoke, though heavy, dissipated too quickly to permeate the flesh and left it only lightly coated in its flavor and resulting complexity. I will use either a stronger foil or one of Debra’s stainless steel baking pans if I think I can get away with it.
The legs were very good warm that night, cold the next lunch, and shredded into a smoked-chicken salad the third day.
All told it was a successful first try and I looked ahead to the next, more challenging smoking--Grill Smoked Pork Shoulder.