Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part VI – Cookin’ ‘Cue

Okay!  The meat’s on the fire and we get to relax a little.  All we have to do is check on the fire every hour or so, and re-fuel the fire if it needs it.

Re-fueling, or stoking, the fire is a fairly straightforward undertaking.  If your kettle’s like mine and the cooking surface, or grill, is hinged so that access to the grate can be had without removing the grill, then you can stoke with a minimum of bother.  Just make sure (before you put the meat on) that you've oriented the cooking surface so that the hinged pieces are above your two little fires on the grate.  Otherwise, your only option when stoking is to remove the cooking surface (and the meat) entirely each time you stoke.

The only real trick (and there always seems to be a trick, doesn’t there?) in stoking your fire is in knowing when it needs more fuel.  We determine this visually.

I stoke when, in my estimation, the amount of fuel remaining is between 1/3 and 1/4 of the amount that was there when I lit my fire.  If you let the fuel burn down to where there’s less than 1/4 of the original amount, then you could be pushing your luck; there may not be enough heat energy left to ignite the new fuel.  With this in mind, I’m inclined to stoke when the fuel remaining is closer to 1/3 than it is to 1/4 of the original amount.

Also, bear in mind that while I say fire, as if there was just one, there are actually two small fires to deal with, one on either side of the drip pan. and we need to treat them equally.  If one needs stoking and the other one doesn’t, stoke both anyway, even if you put just a single wood chunk on the fire that doesn’t need stoking.  A little extra fuel never hurts.

Now on occasion, you may find that one of your little fires doesn’t want to cooperate.  If one of your fires (which we’ll call the ‘ailing’ fire, in contrast to the other ‘healthy’ fire) won’t stay lit, the probable reason is that it’s not getting enough air.  This is usually because ash and/or other debris have accumulated in the bottom of the kettle on the side beneath the ailing fire, and is restricting ventilation on that side of the kettle.  Since hot air rises, and since hotter air rises faster, the air flow, or draft, created by the healthy fire is greater than the draft created by the ailing fire.

However, as the draft produced by the ailing fire slows down, the ailing fire burns cooler and draws even less air.  Things kind of snowball over time, the ailing fire drawing less and less air as it burns cooler and cooler, until the ailing fire goes out completely, due to oxygen starvation.  Meanwhile, the healthy fire burns along merrily, still receiving adequate because it now has all of the available air.  The healthy fire, in fact,  may get too much oxygen and may even burst into flame, because there’s now more oxygen available than the healthy fire needs in order to smolder.

The best remedy for fires that go out is prevention.  While you can (and should) clear the intake (bottom) ventilators,  by adjusting the intake damper from lock-to-lock and then putting the damper back in the position it was originally, from time to time while cooking, a little preventive maintenance helps, too.  You don’t have to clean your kettle thoroughly between uses, but you should at least get as much ash/debris as you can out of the bottom of the kettle.  If your kettle came with an enclosed ash catcher attached, just sweep the debris through the ventilator holes (bottom damper fully open for this) into the ash container. You should, incidentally, empty the catcher periodically, because if it’s filled to near the top, it can affect air flow.  If your kettle is not equipped with such a device, I’ve found it expedient to haul the kettle to an area of the property that’s not easily visible, close the bottom damper completely, loosen any debris in the kettle with a stiff brush, and then pick the kettle up bodily and dump the contents on the ground.

No, I do not jest.  Unless you barbecue every day, you won’t create enough ash to have a noticeable pile.  Moreover, kettle ash is not harmful to plants, including grass, nor to animals.  On the other hand, I know that some folks just aren’t comfortable with the idea of dumping ashes in their backyards.  For ash disposal, such individuals should keep a dedicated ash receptacle, i.e., can, plastic bag, etc., for the purpose.

Just one more thing before we close up shop for the day, and this is important.  As surely as I blog about cooking, you’ll have heard this admonition before (often, no doubt; possibly ad nauseum).  It may be trite, but I think it’s worth repeating:  NEVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES introduce hot ashes into the environment!  Either put them in a container that is approved as being suitable for hot embers, or allow them to cool to the point that they’re cool to the touch, or douse them thoroughly with water, before disposing of them.  The reason for this is so obvious that I won’t waste your time explaining.

That’s today’s installment.  Have a great weekend, and . . .

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part V – Time to Barbecue!

When we left off yesterday, we were ready to light a fire in the kettle.  Before we do that, though, we’ll need to prep the pork shoulder.  Actually, you can light the kettle and then prep the shoulder, because it takes a while for the hardwood chunks to catch fire and really blaze, and there’s really not much to prepping the meat.

Now, typically, when you’re merely grilling relatively small cuts, such as steaks, you’ll want the meat to be at room temperature.  Not so when we barbecue.  You can take a cold (not frozen, mind you) pork shoulder directly from the refrigerator and throw it in the kettle.  The reason you can do this is that you’ll be cooking the meat for hours, literally, at low temperature.  The meat (any food, in fact) never gets hotter than the temperature at which you cook it (in the neighborhood of 225º F to 250º F), and it will take it a while to get to that temperature, regardless of whether you start the meat at room temperature (68º F, officially) or refrigerator temperature (in the neighborhood of 35º F to 40º F).  This is because the difference between room and refrigerator temperature is not that great when compared to the 225/250-degree cooking temperature.

Incidentally, you may be thinking, ”hey, wait a minute here, there’s not that much difference in temperature between 35º and 32º, and 32º is freezing; so why couldn’t I cook a frozen, 32º shoulder and expect it to be done in the same amount of time?”.

That’s a reasonable enough question.  The answer is, because water can be ice or liquid water at 32º, that you probably can get away with it if the temperature of the shoulder really is 32º.  At temperatures even a little colder than 32º F, at which there's no liquid water, only solid ice, however, all bets are off.

The reason, while trying not to get too technical with it, is that meat is mainly water, and it’s the water that freezes when you freeze meat.  When water freezes, it loses energy in the form of heat.  In freezing, liquid water loses heat energy and drops to a temperature just below its freezing point and then spikes back up to its freezing point as ice crystals start to form.  During this time, its temperature does not change, but the water continues to lose heat energy.  This energy, lost during the formation of ice crystals, is called the enthalpy of fusion or heat of fusion of water.  Enthalpy of fusion is expressed in units of unit heat energy (e.g., calories, BTUs, etc.) per unit of mass (e.g., grams, pounds-mass, etc.), and is the amount of energy, in the form of heat, that has to be put back into the frozen water to get it to turn back into liquid water again.  For water, enthalpy/heat of fusion is significant, and has to come from somewhere if you want the ice to melt.  When you’re trying to cook frozen meat, your fire supplies this energy.

But wait.  It gets worse.

Not only must your fire supply the enthalpy-of-fusion energy in order to melt the ice during the shift of water from the solid phase to the liquid phase, but the amount of energy to do the shift depends on the amount of ice you’re trying to melt, and that depends on the weight of the meat you’re cooking - the heavier the meat, the more energy.

On top of that, your fire also must supply energy just to raise the temperature of the meat to the melting point of water before melting can even begin.  And, as you probably guessed, the amount of heat it takes to do this also depends on the weight of your meat.

Now remember, your fire is by design only a puny little smoky, low-temperature one, and it doesn’t have the clout to raise the temperature of 10 to 14 pounds of frozen meat to the melting point of water, and then supply even more heat to melt the ice. The only thing to do under the circumstances would be to increase the cooking time significantly.  But if you did that, you might still end up with barbecue that’s charred to cinders on the outside and uncooked and cold on the inside.  And even if you got lucky and it cooked all the way through, your barbecue would almost certainly wind up being unappetizingly charred on the outside.  Bottom line, if you’re tempted to try to barbecue frozen meat, don’t.  If you do it anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Okay, okay.  I’m off my soapbox.  Back to the task at hand . . .

All right. We’ve taken the unfrozen pork shoulder out of the ‘fridge.  Now what?

We could just throw it in the kettle as is, but that probably wouldn’t be a good thing.  A better idea might be to wash it first.  The meat has been processed, remember, and there may be certain processing residues on the exposed surfaces of the meat.  Not that these may be harmful in any way, shape, or form, but they may flavor the barbecue in ways that are unappetizing when exposed to the heat of cooking.  It’s best not to take chances, so we rinse the shoulder under running cold tap-water, just to make sure.

Rinsing is sufficient to remove possible undesired substances.  The shoulder’s ready for the kettle now, but I like to go a step further.  I’m fairly sure that this doesn’t really do anything materially to affect the flavor of the outcome, but I still like to rub the fat-cap with sea-salt.  Home cooks (especially barbecuers), like baseball players and gamblers, are a suspertitious lot, and my salt-rubbing ritual seems to bring me good barbecuing luck.  You, on the other hand, need not be bound by my superstitions, so you can omit the salt.  Besides, I only claim that it brings me good luck.  It may (Heaven forbid!) have the opposite effect on your barbecuing.

We’re ready to start barbecuing - FINALLY! The pork shoulder has been prepped (with or without the inclusion of the salt-rubbing ritual), and the hardwood chunks in the kettle look like they mean business.  We cover the kettle with the lid and adjust the intake damper in the base of the kettle, all the while eye-balling the fire through the fully-open exhaust damper in the lid.  When there’s just enough air getting to the fire so that there’s no longer flame, we’re ready for the shoulder.

We remove the lid, place the shoulder on the cooking surface over the drip-pan, and replace the lid.  All we have to do now is stoke the fire periodically, and think about what sort of sauce we want to serve with our barbecue.  We’ll take up these rather important matters in future posts.

Happy cooking (or more specifically, barbecuing)!