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No, I haven’t gone native and forsaken the gas or electric rigs but I’ve firmly rested on what most call a “labor of love” – smoking with a pure wood-fired rig. Since the run in Tennessee last Thanksgiving I realized that your gas and electric rigs are glorified outdoor ovens where smoke is optional. NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT… I still intend on doing most of my long-haul smokes with the gas rig just for the simplicity of use. If you’ve been hanging around loweralabama.org long enough you’ve seen that I’ve made fun of stick burning purists before for that very fact. For a big bird, brisket, or butt a low-maintenance gas or electric rig is difficult to beat. You’ll spend the first 2-3 hours feeding it wood chips to get a good smoke ring then you can go to bed and not have to worry about stoking the thing all night long. For ribs or chicken or any other short-haul job, it’s all about the smoke and the stick-fired rig can’t be beat!

For those who have tried my smoked turkey recipe from the previous post, I have an upgrade for you. If you’re willing to invest an all-nighter into smoking your bird, I challenge you to add a couple more days to your project by dropping the bird into a brine solution prior to smoking it.

Amanda Yeager, a friend and coworker, supplied me with the brine mix for the first turkey this year. The mix consisted of mostly salt and brown sugar with a few herbs and spices which you can tune to taste however the most important parts are the salt and sugar. Brining will help lock in the turkey’s juices which are normally cooked out causing the meat to be dry. Brining in conjunction with smoking produces a really moist bird that will have people gnawing the last tidbits of the meat off its bones. That’s IF you’re willing to put the time into turning this boring bird into something spectacular. As the saying goes, a moist turkey will disappear fast and a dry one will feed 500 people.

Here are a few guidelines on brining:
- As always, practice food preparation safety. Turkey is no less dangerous than chicken when it comes to safe handling.
- You’ll need a container large enough to contain your bird with it completely submerged in water.
- You’ll need to keep the temperature at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Kosher salt isn’t a must however it will dissolve in water completely where standard salt will not.
- If you get a frozen bird with one of those handy-dandy temperature pop-ups, do not remove it. It will leave a nice little hole for the tasty juices to escape through. Note – these gizmos don’t seem to work in a smoker so your meat thermometer is still key in monitoring the bird’s inner temperature.
- for every 3 gallons of water, use a baseline of 1/2 cup salt and 1/2 cup sugar however the best way to get your mix correct is the taste test. Add your 1/2 cup of each to the water and taste to get your perfect sweet and salty taste but DO NOT taste the water after you’re dropped in the turkey – follow all rules for the safe handling of raw poultry.
- leave your bird in the brine for at least 12 hours if it is thawed at the time you put it in there. I’ve read everything from 12 hours to several days, I think anything more than 2 days is bordering dangerous however if you drop the bird into your mix completely frozen and let it thaw in the brine, 2 days is perfect.
- if you’re using a cooler or some container that won’t fit in your fridge, make sure you keep the turkey and solution iced down. On all three of my 2-day brines, I’ve had to pour hot water on the turkey to melt the ice out of the chest cavity in order to free the neck and that little bag of YUCK. The whole concept of giblet gravy is negated with this turkey because the moisture is built in – no external influences needed to this bird edible!

Other ingredients such as your herbs and spices, chopped vegetables, etc,… for the solution are totally up to you. And speaking of vegetables, a new addition to this year’s birds was stuffing the chest cavity full of chopped onions and potatoes. I also used onions in potatoes in the smoker’s reservoir. That again, is up to you for your favorite veggies or stuffing. This is only to lend more moisture to the inner parts of the bird.

I also stripped back the rub to just salt, pepper, and brown sugar for the last turkey which was clearly the best one of the season. With Thanksgiving over, I have at least 2 more birds left to smoke for friends before the 2009 turkey season is closed out.

Good news though – next year I’ll be joining a tradition of smoking those birds earlier and more often. I plan to use this as an excuse to acquire a much larger, possibly even mobile smoking rig and run a little back yard business of smoking the big birds. And pork butt. And Ribs. And Brisket. And…..

I just finished carving the 3rd 2009 Thanksgiving turkey and I’m getting better at this every time! Two of the three were smoked in my Wal-Mart economy vertical gas rig and the last in a New Braunfels wood-fired vertical with a side firebox – nevermind the brick, we’ll get to that later. I’ll gladly admit using the stick burner was a lot more fun albeit more work since I was up every so often feeding it logs to keep the temperature where I wanted it.

The gas rig is by far the easiest way to go. I’ve never used an electric rig but I can’t imagine it being very much different than a gas smoker except you wouldn’t have to deal with keeping a gas bottle charged up for use. One trick I’ve learned over the last few smokes with my gas burner is to use chunks instead of chips in the tinderbox of these non-wood-fired boxes. I’ve found Chunks to be the better way to go mainly because they will produce a better head of smoke than chips and won’t burn out nearly as fast in a gas or assumably electric environment. I’ve heard that your temperature is also somewhat easier to control with an electric rig – there’s very little variance between not hot enough and too hot with the gas box! Gas and electric rigs also are really nothing more than outdoor ovens with optional smoke. With wood-fired rigs you don’t have much of a choice about your product being bathed in smoke for its entire stay in your cooker.

One thing is for sure, neither of these two verticals will hold more than one turkey at a time or at most 6 slabs of ribs so I’m on a mission before the next holiday season – UPGRADE! I’m thinking for my next smoker, something with wheels and a trailer hitch. What I want can’t be bought in a store, I’ll have to build it myself. Everyone has seen those home-made rigs that are built out of an old gas container with a firebox on the end – I want to take it a step further and have a choice of either gas or wood and, a mounted burner for crawfish boils, fish frying and such. Basically a rolling outdoor kitchen. I have this crazy idea of taking a little 5×8 trailer I already own and building a wooden deck, complete with rails! I know – it sounds crazy but it would be unique!

Several years ago, when I moved to lower Alabama I ran into a gifted soul named Dwight Salley, (pictured on the left) known by his friends as “Uncle Dwight” or just plain “UD.” Even back then while we were both working for a tech bubble-burst now defunct telecommunications company, UD was peddling spices and white-labeled hot sauce. Since the little telephone company went bust UD took his show on the road and Big Daddy’s Seasonings for all things became real! Over the past few years UD has been supplying me with seasonings, sauces, rice, and fish fry (some he didn’t even know about — THANKS WEBBY!) and recently we’ve decided to partner up on the web to promote each other. UD is supplying me with recipes and anything new that comes along or, anything I try which brings me to the point of this post – this weekend’s 6lb Boston Butt THOROUGHLY dusted with Big Daddy’s Smokey BBQ Rub.

The pork butt was outstanding – usual method from the other articles; wash the meat let it dry a bit then cover it with rub and slap it in the fridge for 12-24 hours. 10 hours in the box at 240 degrees yielded a perfectly cooked product with a deep flavor penetration I haven’t achieved prior to this smoke. Between my wife and I, a fresh pork butt barely has time to cool before we tear into it. With no additional BBQ sauce added, the flavor from the bark and sweet and salty taste deeper below.

After the initial post-smoke feeding frenzy, if any meat survives the slaughter my wife an I bestow upon it, the remainder of the pulled pork is neatly stuffed into zippy bags, given a generous helping of Pappy’s XXX White Lightenin’ Barbecue Sauce and plopped into the refrigerator to be enjoyed later.

Stay tuned for more updates on grub cooked with UD’s seasonings a new recipes!

There are two universal constants with food: it’s hard to beat a cream cheese-stuffed jalapeno and, you can wrap nearly ANYTHING in bacon and it be very tasty. So what do we have here – a cream cheese stuffed bacon-wrapped jalapeno pepper with some sausage! Where can you go wrong with that!

Most recipes I’ve seen for stuffed smoked jalapenos called for just the cream cheese stuffed pepper with bacon however lately I’ve been seeing a lot of recipes adding lit’l smokies smoked sausages which are good however I wanted to kick it up a level and used chorizo sausage instead. Chorizo is a lot messier then the little cocktail weenies but if you’ve got any sense you’ll be wearing prep gloves when handling the peppers anyway so it won’t matter.
Continue reading LA-Style Atomic Buffalo Turds

Having the new Publix open close to my house with a killer selection of meats has put the smoker box into high gear. I’ve not been able to find portions of pork shoulder locally that didn’t require the use of a hand truck to get out to the truck and take home. Publix keeps a stock of 3-4 pounders that are perfect and don’t take a day of smoker-watching to complete. This weekend I got lazy and didn’t want to deal with putting the rub together so I bought a pre-made jar of McCormick Grill Mates Pork Rub and basically chunked the shoulder into a gallon zipper bag, poured half the contents of the rub into the bag, shook it around to get a good covering then tossed the whole mess into the refrigerator for 24 hours. I was pretty much out of everything, even down to half a bag of cherry wood chips so I tried the pre-mixed rub and I have to say, it was great. When I figure out the name of the product I’ll let you know!.

I put the shoulder into the smoker at around 9:30am Sunday morning and ran the box a little hotter than I’ve done before – I tried to keep it at a level 250 degrees for the entire smoke. By noon I had 30 Atomic Buffalo Turds wrapped and tossed into the smoker for their redemption as well. The other significant change I made in this cook was not wrapping the butt in aluminum foil for the last couple of hours. The end result was a perfectly cooked chunk of meat with a great seasoning bark on all sides. My only complaint was it needing just a tad more of a bite – I’ll add a tad of chipotle powder to the rub the next time I try this. The ABTs were ready around 3:30pm, the shoulder was where it needed to be at about 5. I let the internal temperature of the shoulder get up to 210 degrees which worried be but it turned out better than ever regardless.
Continue reading Butt smokin’ – trying a different recipe