Food Smokers and Smoking Tips/Tricks/Techniques

I prefer corn fed.

 

Ack. Different strokes... Grass fed is significantly better to me. Grass is their natural food instead of corn. Corn is used to fatten them up.

 

Grass fed deer, corn and grass fed beef for me lol

 

Had some whatever-fed deer tonight for dinner...yum.

Pulled the cheese at 2 hrs in the smoker with the Amazn Smoker. Definitely plenty of smoke. Vac'd it all up and into the fridge to rest for a week or so. Did sharp cheddar, white cheddar, habanero cheddar, Swiss & Gouda.

 

You wouldn't happen to be talking about the Com-Pak would you?

 

I don't remember the name. It was on the left if you were going away from the school. You had to drive down an alley to get to the drive thru. I lived on campus for a couple of years and then moved to east Irvine street near the stadium. I walked all over downtown. Ricatonis was the best.


Edit...I looked at a map. There's a big fucking bank there now. I graduated in 03 and have only been back once. I loved living there, but there's just no jobs in that area for me.

 

Ricatonis is my very favorite restaurant in this area. Are you sure it was Pine and not Court St.?

 

Definitely pine. It was in the end of a tiny strip of stores. Google Street view shows a big bank where I think it was.

But this is a BBQ tread. In my 4 years in Florence, I ate my weight in BBQ from sunshine BBQ at the corner of pine and Chisholm.

 

Join the Kansas City barbecue society (think it's $30/year) and you get a pass to Restaurant Depot and can go as much as you want. The only restriction is you can't buy alcohol. I joined 2 years ago and think it's absolutely worth it. Once in a great while I find ribs for the same price, and sometimes maybe a bit less, at another store but the ribs from RD are consistently good and the racks seem to be bigger. Plus, they have a lot of other stuff there.

 

Sometimes you feel like brisket but don't want to deal with a 15 pound packer; +/- $40 , +/- 14 hour cook time, 15 pounds of meat for 2 people you now need to vac seal and store in a tiny freezer, etc.

A local store has small flats for sale and I decided to see how they would work. This one is about 3 1/2 pounds or so. SPOG plus a little parsley and a touch of brown sugar. Injected with beef stock and a bit of Worcestershire sauce. I'll do a few hours on smoke mode, move it up to 230-240 until IT gets around 150f then wrap it in peach paper. Fingers crossed!

 

Got a nice bark on this shoulder.



I've got a lot of goose breasts I'm going to start brining for pastrami. February is our usual month for preparing meats for the year. Sausages, pastrami, smoked pork. Gonna be a busy month!

 

Well... it's been on for about 4 1/2 hours. The fat is rendering (I can see it dripping off the bottom) and the IT is sitting at 151f. It may have hit the stall. If it stays there for much longer I'll wrap it. I was hoping for more bark (or at least some bark). Kinda worried about that. The absence of bark may be the shorter cook time or that I used a very light rub. It's so thin and tiny I didn't want a rub to overwhelm the flavor. Keeping my fingers crossed...

 

Well it came out tasty, if not a little dry. Not a lot of bark. It was taking so long I pulled it from the smoker and put it in the oven to finish (it was wrapped so smoke was not a factor at this point). It took much longer than I expected (about 8 hours).

 

The one flat I did came out dry in the middle third. I didn't take it high enough. Next time I do a flat, I'll start checking it at an internal of 195, and let it go higher until it passes the toothpick test.

I did a full brisky for New Years, it finished at 208 or so. Was tender and juicy as hell.

 

Ya I had one of my flats come out dry, all the rest have been pretty good nice and juicy.

 

did you have a pan of water in with it as well?

 

Heck ya. Some slightly dry in the middle brisket is better than a slab of any tofu any day in my eyes

 

Yep

 

No doubt. Lunch today will be a chopped brisket sammich with a little BBQ sauce mixed in.

 

Ahhhhhh the goodness that is leftovers.