The Sect of Rama

Today, I dispatched a 9# pork butt via a combination of slow cookeries- 2 hours in an improvised "medium orange egg", followed by ~12 hours in the oven at 230F. It wasn't my intention to resort to the oven, but it became clear I wouldn't have the BBQ fortitude to finish the meat any other way-- details below.

First, a post-mortem on my last smoking session, ribs in a cardboard box, which was educational and somewhat frustrating. A few things I took away from it were:

- maintaining a constant chamber temperature manually is a major PITA without a substantial amount of thermal mass.

- loading a skillet full of unsoaked wood chips and throwing it on a hot plate on high (even with a perforated pie pan on top) will literally be a flash in the pan-- all the smoke all at once, and a build up of flammable gases which can ignite and cause a scary "whumpf!"

- anything less than "high" on the hot plate is insufficient to reach smoking temps (at least in my neck of the woods this time of year. You Crazy Coloradians have enough space out there to build a whole smoke *house*, so don't start whining about how cold you have it ;)

- significant amounts of smoldering wood chips drastically increase the chamber temperature.

- wood chips that have been reduced to ash seem to act as an insulator, causing the chamber temp to drop as the heating coil is shielded.

- while cardboard is a great insulator, its flammability doesn't lend itself well to leaving it unattended (which is key when you're talking 5+ hours).

- an electric hot plate, even while on high, is only sufficient at maintaining a chamber temp of ~230F when all other conditions are favorable.


Lessons learned (and some confirmed after today's session). The least I hoped to take away from it (besides edible meat) was a learning experience to apply to my future BBQ sessions- which I definitely will be...

When I got started on the pulled pork this morning, there was still frost on the grass, but my hope was the "upgrade" to the terracota chamber would provide more insulation (as well as being more durable and fireproof.) Sadly, the former wasn't true, and I struggled to maintain high enough temperatures in the chilly winter air. Three wood chip batches and two hours later, I conceded and headed to the kitchen to the glory of an electric oven (and a beckoning cappuccino machine).

The end result was definitely tasty, and I will be doing it again in some fashion. You can find photos of the session here.

What did I learn today? It may be time to give up the hot plate approach. Its just too hard to sustain hot enough temps, and even if it were able to, a PID controller may be necessary to keep the temperature within the acceptable temperature range without frequent manual intervention. The decision to move away from electric is certainly being spurred by the fact my brother gave me a Stoker BBQ system for Christmas after reading my earlier post mentioning how sweet Bbum's setup is. I would have used it today, but it means moving away from electric and towards a fuel-air combustion setup, which I'm still in the process of improvising (which will be the subject of a future blog entry. In short, it involves taking the terracotta pot and replacing the electric elements with the guts from a cast iron hibachi thats been sitting unused in the garage for the past two years. Based on the looks of it, the internals of a BGE are very similar to what I have in mind.)

I do have a couple outstanding questions though. The Cooks Illustrated part of me is always looking for the quickest and easiest approach-- and smoking huge hunks of meat *is* tedious and time consuming (until you concede to getting proper equipment.) I'd post these to the eGullet forums, but after registering some time ago after reading a great knife sharpening tutorial, I'm ashamed to say I haven't been back-- and now they're down for maintenance until the new year! Bah, humbug. So for now, I pose these here:

- Would a BBQ-only session produce significantly different flavor-- it seems after the first few hours of smoking, the meat would form an impermeable protein layer and render additional smoking moot, and only the dry heat comes into play? (Surely this isn't the case, or people would just do a short intense smoking on the 'que and finish in the oven like I did-- but I haven't seen any scientific reasoning to dismiss such as approach.)

- Would cutting the pork butt in half to increase surface area as well as shorten cook times have any adverse affect, such as moisture content? Cooking it whole until it reached an internal temp of 190F was *plenty* moist, so I'm not to concerned about dry meat. If anything, next time, I'll remove any visible fat prior to applying the dry rub. (I lost a lot of tasty "bark" this time when I removed a slab of external fat post cook.)