Smokin'

I bought this smoker right before our wedding, used it to ruin a lot of meat for that wedding, in fact (I burned the food to a cinder, though people ate it all up and claimed to like it—I didn't know I had so many friends who craved a mouthful of ashes). But once I figured it out, it was great, like living at Gates.

Well, it was great until it wasn't. I burned out on barbecue, I really did. The smell and taste of smoked meat just nauseated me for a while. And then I had that whole second round of heart disease thing, the bypass surgery at 43 years old, maybe the last thing I needed was to find red meat palatable.

But I'm past the burnout part even if the red meat still isn't an entirely good idea. I love the stuff, and I range from feeling I should never eat it again no matter what to thinking that with my genetics, plaque's just gonna happen, the best I can do is take the drugs they prescribe, exercise a lot, hope for a miracle cure someday. I know there's probably a truth somewhere in between, but anyway I loaded the smoker up.

A whole brisket, 17 lbs, took up most of the lower rack. The top had a pork Boston Butt and about 20 pounds of Polish sausage from Bichelmeyer. The sausage came off after a couple of hours, maybe less. That was one of the lessons from the wedding feast, it may be a massive amount of meat but even stacked on top of each other sausages cook a lot faster than roasts. That was supper on Saturday night. The rest, the brisket and pork butt, that came off the following morning, about 16 hours in at 220ºF. I didn't even put rub on the meat this time, but the first little taste and I was in barbecue heaven.