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.

Sourdough!

 

                It is now a quarter past 6 AM and there, on the kitchen counter, is my first Sourdough Bread, (or what remains after gifting a loaf to Evander and his parents, morning toast for Debra and me, and a couple of slices she took with her to show off to her Chef).

In Foreground: Two Sourdough Ryes

                It is as if all my decades of bread making led, inexorably, to this point. There is a complexity and subtlety of flavors and textures I had never achieved before- flavors that develop and change as the bite of bread passes from front teeth and tongue-tip, across the expanse of mid-tongue where it mixes with the mouth’s wet, and still again as it is crushed and ground between millstone molars; a density of crust and spring of crumb beyond previous efforts. I wonder if I will ever again be satisfied with less play of hue and contrast.

Mature Starter Fed For Use In Rye Bread

                Eight days ago I boiled bowls, spoons and Mason jars to sterilize, purify, make new, and sanctify. Using them I mixed rye flour and spring water, nothing more, and captured wild yeast from the Earth’s grain and the air around it. Not quite creating life, but nearly so, I watched the product of this mash swell and aerate, then fed and nurtured it, stubbornly ignoring the Sophie’s Choice of discarding half of each day’s new colony. That overflow I used to produce a hybrid that failed - a monster, a mutation, a bastard child that marked my first utterly failed bread in years.

                ‘We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes,’ I tell my children, and remembering this, set aside the rending of garment and gnashing of teeth. From this learning opportunity came a renewed humility and faith in the teachings of R.L. Beranbaum, and a new willingness to not stray too far from the path.  The rewards came in their time. The dough started to look and feel like a cousin of doughs I’d made before, just a tad more elastic, the gluten more developed and the aroma more mature. The four fermentations came at a statelier pace. I had to meet this less compliant bread on its own terms-only minor adjustments seemed possible, or advisable.

                And finally, the tangy fragrance blended with the familiar caramel-and-earth smell I have so often known from my oven, and a new satisfaction filled me. It seems the breads I’d made before these were instant, modern, made from mixes, a ready formula for the impatient and time-deficient. I had taken my place among the long and narrowed line of true Bread Bakers whose willingness to invest a week and more in the process yielded a fuller and more substantial food. As baking bread is more truly a human enterprise than plucking fruit or dropping prey or carrion onto embers, making sourdough - that securing of living matter from the ether, sustaining and nourishing it, urging it to reproduce, then killing it off in a final frenzied microscopic orgy -  is a deeper manipulation of the environment to generate fuel for our bodies.

                The first of these breads is imperfect - slightly too deeply - crusted, under-salted by a few grams, but I can work through these minor shortcomings. The seed starter has come to room temperature and I will expand, nourish and divide it to create its offspring. Newer generations will be raised to new heights.

The Bread Man Cometh

          Mid May of 2010: we said goodbye to the Empire Diner.

        We’d learned of the passing of the old friend, broke from our scattered pursuits and felt, separately and collectively, the need to gather.

            Two-hundred and more joined to attend the Diner’s wake. Bright yellow sunlight let us walk in shirtsleeves as we did what is right and proper at such a rite of passage-met new friends and those we thought we’d never see again, ate and laughed at tales both oft-told and new, cried and drank and cursed the fates and came, at last, to acceptance of the finality of it…

 and then returned to our lives strewn across the country and the world.

        Nearly nine months later and no new Empire had been established, though many had been considered.

            Nearly nine months later, in the tease of warmer afternoons in Gotham, (knowing that still a sudden return of Winter could quick-freeze  naïve, foolhardy robins  and leave them to plummet  like shocked, avian hail about our streets), we longed for the New that would recapture the Old.

And now a year has passed and we grow restive and hungry for the joy of cooking.

Despite-

                        Twenty friends over for a Crab and Mussel Boil in the backyard;

The Call To Table

Debra's Beautiful Settings

Bread To Be Torn by Hand

EEEK!

YUM!

                                                                           

                        Thanksgiving Feast for twenty-seven;

Another of Debra's Tables

Tryptophan Conquers All

                                                                                

                        Brazilian Feijoada for eighteen;

Sorry, Too Busy Eating To Take Photos

Still the need to flex kitchen muscles persists.

Thirteen months of gestation is long-enough!

Bread Man is now on the scene and that mild-mannered alter ego will teach you the ins and outs of BreadBaking and will share thoughts on Bread, BreadBaking, food in general and life in as strange a place as Brooklyn.

Annabel's, Leelee's, and mine