I recently moved to a place where I could satisfy a long-term goal: to learn how to barbeque. For a while now, I've kind of wanted to pick up a food hobby that I could obsess over, like people do with wine or coffee. The problem is that I'm allergic to wine and don't really care for coffee. During covid I decided (despite living in Massachusetts) that I wanted barbeque to be that thing.
There isn't much in terms of authentic, huge cuts of meat smoked over a fire for a whole day sort of barbeque in New England, but I learned the basics and ate from the restaurants I could find. Moving to a place where grilling and smoking were permitted was the big change.
I own a small wood-pellet smoker now and for the past year I've been trying to smoke things. In the process, I've started to gain a better appreciation for the cooking method and how its lessons can be applied to other parts of my life.
If it takes time, make time
The first few cooking attempts were what I would consider pretty big failures. The meat was tough and dry, even after 8-12 hours of cooking. I kept getting up earlier and earlier to start, but was always left with the same problem: Dinner time is approaching and the meat isn't done, so I crank the heat to bring it to temp, say "Mission Accomplished" with no sense of irony, and provide bad food to my family.
After some study, I learned that the meat can be rested (coming from an engineering background, I call it tempering) for a considerable period and still be good. So my one-day cooks are now two-day cooks. I start in the afternoon with full acknowledgement that this is going to be cooking all night, and resting until dinner. No more early mornings!
I have a habit of trying to cram too much into every single day. There's just so many things I want to see or do that I never get to appreciate each one fully, because I have to be on a train by 3 or else I'll miss the whatever. I'm trying to do fewer things, but also, if I know I can't, I try to stretch the time they take. Adding an extra day to a weekend or hours to a night, when possible, has helped me.
Sometimes it's not possible, but at least then I'm usually in a better mental place to deal with it.
For fuck's sake, slow down
Per above, I do a lot of running around, and free time has always been at a premium. I started cooking for my family around age 14, when it became apparent that my parents wouldn't. So dinner was sandwiched between soccer practice and homework. I learned how to cook fast rather than good, and the proliferation of competition cooking shows in my twenties only further emphasized that cooking (and by extension, everything else) should be done as fast as possible, lest Gordon Ramsay scream at you.
You can't apply that logic to barbeque. You just can't. There's nothing you can do that will make the connective tissues in your meat break down any faster, and just because you did the last one in 14 hours doesn't mean this one won't take 16. It's maddening, honestly, for a person like me.
So much of "indoor", "normal" cooking is about multitasking. We get those Hello Fresh meals, and their estimates of how long it takes to cook is usually off by 20-30 minutes. They assume that you have chef-like knife skills (I don't, but I'm not bad) and like two stoves to cook everything all at once. It's absurd. I don't really mind, though? Because I'm so conditioned that yes, this is how your entire life is, just a mad dash from one thing to another.
But I do see the appeal of sitting by the smoker and just looking at the temperature, beverage in hand, and just... watching it. Maybe wander off to do something else for a while, hang out for a while, and spend the day just tending to a thing. Doing only one thing, but doing it really well. I'm not wired that way, but I can try. I can dream.
If something seems wrong, it's probably wrong
Those pellet smokers are not foolproof at all. It was only a few cooks in when it started making a weird sound sometimes. I let it run like that for a solid month before I took all the pellets out and took it apart to the best of my ability. The pellets had gotten clogged. I was so worried that I had spent a lot of money on something bad that I stopped using it almost the rest of the summer out of fear it would break again. Come to find out that's a very common problem, and I had fixed it exactly as I should.
I was also having a problem where, as previously mentioned, everything took too long to cook. I thought it was just me, but basically I lost trust in the temperatures it was telling me and stuck a kitchen thermometer in there. Come to find out the built-in probe was running about 10° too hot and the smoker itself was running 20° too cold!
No wonder nothing was coming out right.
So now I've got better thermometers and I'm learning to be less afraid to just manhandle that machine. This happens to me at work, too. I am a fairly junior level employee, so I frequently get told that things can't be done for one reason or another. In the past I just accept that, but I'm learning to trust my gut. If something sounds like bullshit to me, I'm not going to stop my investigation on their say-so.
Plan for the future
This may come as a shock, but people don't actually like the same meal three days in a row? When you smoke 18 pounds of meat and there's only 4 of you, that's what tends to happen. So we're switching things up, making different side dishes each night to keep it interesting, repurposing leftovers into things like chili or tacos. It's been great.
Even though it's only a few days, that kind of longer-range planning has been really helpful to me. I don't have any specific examples but I do feel more relaxed knowing that our next several meals are taken care of.
That's kind of all, really. I feel like it's starting to come together for me, like a zen of smoking. Once I get the basics down, then I can really dive into like, all the different styles and start to really nerd out on all this