Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Epilogue

A few notes and cautions with regard to the topic of barbecuing are probably in order, especially for the novice barbecuer.

Firstly, there's the question of how the barbecue is supposed to look when it's done.  The answer is black.  That's right, black.  If your shoulder's not black, something's wrong.  It should look like you've burned it.

You haven't really burned it, though.  The black color is the result of 10 to 14 hours of constant exposure to hardwood smoke.  The fat-cap is now a shriveled, black and nameless thing.  The surface of the meat on the side opposite the fat-cap has a nice, attractive bark to it.  The meat has a deep, red or pink smoke ring around the outside that you could see if you cut into it.  And, most importantly, the meat is moist, succulent, fall-off-the-bone tender, and delicious.

Secondly, it's possible, on account of the imprecise nature of our heat-control method, that your meat will look like it's done, but won't quite be, after the prescribed amount of time because your fire was not quite hot enough.  On the other hand, the fire may have been too hot, and your meat looks like it's done, and is done, before the prescribed time has elapsed.  Never fear.  We have ways of dealing with these situations.

For cases where we suspect we have one of the abovegoing anomalous conditions in play, there is what is known in barbecuing circles as the shake 'n' bake test.  To perform the shake 'n' bake test, you just grab hold of the exposed shank bone, which should be clearly visible and identifiable as bone by now, of the shoulder and give it a good shake.  If the meat loosens from the bone and looks like it's ready to fall off, the 'cue's done.  Contrariwise, if it don't, it ain't.  It's that simple.

I think it's always a good idea to shake 'n' bake when the meat looks done, just in case.  Remember, though, that the bone will be hot.  Protect your hand - by using tongs or pliers, or by wearing an oven mitt - so you don't burn yourself.

Thirdly, in case you're inclined to try to eat what's left of the fat-cap, don't.  It's as hard and tough and unappetizing as it looks, and it tastes about as bad as it looks.  Toss it, along with the bones, and pull and/or chop what's left.

Pulling pork, incidentally, is merely the act of pulling the meat apart into sections along the grain.  If the meat's too hot to pull with your bare hands, try using a pair of dinner forks in place of your fingers.  Just pull the meat apart into not-so-thick portions.

After you've pulled the pork, you may want to chop the pieces into more convenient lengths if they're too long to be easily managed.  Or, if you don't want to pull the pork at all, you can skip the pulling and just chop your meat up.  In either case, use a chef's knife or cleaver, and chop down, rather than cut back and forth.

Then, again, if none of the above tickles your fancy, there's always the sliced-barbecue route.  Just slice the meat across the grain, like you would a ham (you can do this either with the bone in, or with the bone removed).  A knife with a serrated blade, such as a special-purpose ham-carving knife, works best.

Finally, I realize that, for the uninitiated, kettle-barbecuing a pork shoulder that weighs 10 to 14 pounds may seem a little daunting.  Well, don't let it be.  Barbecuing is actually much less intense than roasting hot dogs on sticks over a campfire, where conditions can change rapidly.  You have to be alert and you have to pay close attention when you're roasting a hot dog.  Otherwise, you just might burn your weenie.

Barbecuing, by way of contrast, happens at a slower pace.  You do have to pay attention, certainly, but barbecuing is still a very leisurely undertaking.  In fact, the only problem you're likely to run into in barbecuing has to do with the time it takes.  You're liable to get so bored during the long hours of cooking time that you fall asleep and let your fire go out.  That minor hazard notwithstanding, barbecuing is an ideal pastime for any lazy person.  This fact no doubt explains why I'm so fond of it.

Happy cooking, ...er..., barbecuing!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part VII – Y’all Want Some Sauce With That ‘Cue?

Now that the ‘cue’s in the kettle, we’ve got some time - from 10 to 14 hours, depending - that we can use to make some sauce.  I like my sauce for barbecued pork shoulder to be a bit thinner than the sauce I make for ribs, and I like it to be less sweet and a bit more tangy, too.  The idea with pulled and/or chopped barbecued pork shoulder is to put the sauce in, rather than on, the meat, and I find that a thinner sauce penetrates the finished meat more readily than a thicker sauce.  You may (and you’re welcome to) differ, but to me, it just tastes better that way.  At any rate, here’s my recipe:

Sauce for Barbecued Pork Shoulder:

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2 recipes dry rub.
1 C distilled vinegar.
1 C water.
1 C tomato catsup.
1 T. prepared mustard.
1 lemon, sliced thin.
1/4 C fresh or cold-pack orange juice (optional)

Add prepared mustard to the vinegar and mix thoroughly.

Dissolve dry rub in vinegar/mustard mixture.

Add the water and the catsup.

Add the orange juice if you’re using it.

Pour mixture into sauce pan and float the lemon slices on top of the liquid.

Simmer for at least 1 hour, preferably longer.  Makes about 3 cups of sauce.

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Pour over meat after the meat has cooled and has been taken off the bone, and pulled and/or chopped.  Do not apply sauce to the meat while the meat’s cooking.  The sauce can,t penetrate the fat-cap anyway, and will probably just carbonize, adding nothing at all to the final result.

Happy cooking (and eating)!

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)!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part IV - Let's Recap

We’ve finally arrived at a point where we have all the information we need to make pork barbecue.  However, there are an awful lot of details, so let’s recap to make sure we're all on the same page:

We’ll be barbecuing a 10- to 14-pound bone-in, uncured pork shoulder.  Our shoulder has had half its skin and external fat removed so that a fat-cap remains on one side.  We will not use a dry rub.

We’re cooking in a round kettle of relatively large diameter.  The kettle is equipped with adjustable ventilation dampers in both kettle body and lid.

We’ll be cooking slowly, at a low temperature.  Total cooking time is based on the rule of one hour per pound or fraction of a pound.  For example, if the shoulder weighs 10-1/4 pounds, then total cooking time is 11 hours.

We’re cooking with smoldering hardwood. and we’re using the indirect method with a drip-pan.  In order to do this:

• We first place an oblong metal-foil drip-pan - one that’s large enough to catch any drops of liquid fat that fall from the shoulder during cooking - in the center of the fire-grate.
• Then, alongside the drip-pan on either side (i.e., along the two opposite sides of the pan that are longest, where there’s enough space), we lay down splints of fat wood in a crossing, or ‘star-like’, pattern (or at least as near to such a pattern as space permits).
• Next, we build a stack of hardwood chunks on top of the fat wood on both sides of the drip-pan, in such a way that all of the chunks will be exposed to the flame of the fat wood when we light it.  We stack our hardwood chunks on the fat wood so that there’s enough fat wood exposed under both stacks to be able to light them.

At this point, we’re ready to fire up our kettle and actually start barbecuing, which is the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part III – Selecting the Cut

Today’s post is about actually cooking traditional pork barbecue in a kettle.

For starters, let me explain why I prefer an uncured pork shoulder when I barbecue.  There are two reasons.

Firstly, My experimentally-determined cooking-time formula for bone-in pork is one hour per pound, or fraction thereof, of meat.  Weight of the piece is thus an important consideration.  Consequently, I like a pork shoulder because it’s big enough without being too big.

At one end of the spectrum are pieces that are too big, such as a so-called green, or uncured, ham.  While I’ve found specimens that are small enough to fit physically in the kettle, they tend to be too heavy to cook in a reasonable amount of time.  I regard a cooking time of more than 14 hours as being unreasonable; I had to give up pulling all-nighters barbecuing, because I need my beauty-sleep.  With that in mind, you can see why I’d consider the cooking time for an 18- or 20-pound ham to be unreasonable.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are pieces of meat that are too small to barbecue.  Years of experience barbecuing with indirect heat and a drip-pan, and slowly, at low temperature, have taught me that there’s sort of a point of diminishing returns when your going in the direction of descending weight.  Pieces of meat that weigh less than some minimum weight (the exact minimum weight depends on the meat, e.g., pork, beef, etc., and the cut) just do not turn out well using my method.  Pieces that are too small always seem to turn out being too dry, and they aren’t good eating.

The second reason I prefer pork shoulder for barbecuing is its fat-cap.  The fat-cap is a layer of fat on one side, usually, of the shoulder. which consists fat beneath a layer of skin.  I say usually because I have seen examples that were minimally processed, where no skin and fat at all were removed.  These are by no means the norm however.  At the other extreme, I’ve seen pork shoulders with all of the skin and most of the external fat removed; more on this later.  In any case, the fat under the fat-cap serves to baste the shoulder during cooking, resulting in a moist and succulent finished product.

Now, although pork shoulder is my cut of choice for barbecuing, I do like to experiment, and so I have fooled around with green hams and Boston butts - which incidentally, are actually shoulder cuts and not hindquarter cuts, as the name implies – from time to time.  I’ve already mentioned that most hams are so heavy that I don’t regard their cooking times as reasonable, but butts are another story.

The Boston butt, also known as Boston blade roast, is part of the pork shoulder, but is taken from higher up the shoulder than the ‘picnic ham’ type of pork shoulder that I prefer to barbecue.  Boston butts are well-marbled, this translates into too greasy a finished product, I think.  There’s just too much fat.  Now I realize that others will disagree, and that’s fine by me.  Boston butt is, after all, the cut of choice for many barbecue restraunts.  However, such establishments use commercial barbecue ovens, and these cook faster then my method.  It’s just possible, I think, that the faster cooking, and the consequentially higher temperatures, renders more of the fat in less time than my method, and this is why commercially-prepared Boston but barbecue isn’t overly greasy.

Although many barbecuers swear by it, I do not use a dry rub when I barbecue a pork shoulder.  A dry rub, or any other flavoring applied externally, would be wasted because the fat-cap would prevent the flavors from fully penetrating a pork shoulders.  On the other hand, if I removed the fat-cap so that the rub could penetrate the meat,  there’d be no fat to baste the meat during cooking.  I suppose I could apply the dry rub to the fat-cap the day before cooking, marinate the shoulder overnight in the ‘fridge, and hope that some of the flavor gets into the meat, but I have my doubts about how well that would work.  My thinking is that, bottom line, if you use dry rub, then do it to a shoulder that’s had all its skin and most of the exterior fat removed, and run the risk of a drier, less succulent result.  Otherwise, don’t use a dry rub.  The flavor will still be out of this world.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part II - Fuel and Temperature Control

In Friday’s post, I talked about barbecue kettles and fuel.  In today’s post, I’ll pick up where we left off and discourse further upon the topic of hardwood fuels.   Then we’ll talk about the role temperature plays in barbecuing, and about temperature control.

It occurs to me that I left you hanging when I mentioned wood chunks, and didn’t say exactly what wood chunks are. Let’s remedy that right now.  Wood chunks are simply chunks of wood, as opposed to logs or cord wood (fireplace wood, which are logs cut crosswise,  or bucked, to a length of 12 to 18 inches, and then split).  Wood chunks are roughly cubical in shape, and are typically 2 to 4 inches on a side.  Wood chunks are available at most barbecue and outdoor living specialty stores, at most big-box home improvement stores, and on line.

Wood chunks, due to their size, are the ideal fuel for kettle barbecuing using the indirect heat method - in which the food is cooked/smoked indirectly by hot combustion gases, not by direct radiant heat - and a drip-pan to catch juics and fat as the food cooks.  This is because fire-grate space is already at a premium in a kettle, and available grate area is further reduced by a drip-pan.  You’ll be using a drip-pan large enough to catch all the drippings from the meat during cooking, so the drip-pan will occupy significant area.  All you’ll have left for the fire are narrow areas on either side of the drip-pan, but that’s plenty of room for 2- to 4-inch cubical chunks.  You really don’t need to stoke the kettle with that much fuel at a time, anyway.  After all, pork barbecue, cooked the traditional way – slowly, at a low temperature - is a time-consuming affair, but it’s worth every minute of it.  You want to cook barbecue over a low, smokey fire, and in order to get the smoke, your fire needs to smolder, rather than burn with a flame.  Hardwood smolders at a lower temperature than the temperature at which it burns.

The benefit of smoldering is that it produces more smoke than does burning with a flame.  This is because fuel smolders instead of burning due to oxygen starvation.  There is not enough oxygen for the fuel to burn completely, and the result is adequate heat with an abundance of smoke, which is the reason you’re going to all this trouble in the first place.  On the other hand,  it’s possible to starve a fire of oxygen to the point that your fuel can’t even smolder, much less burn.  If this happens, the fire will go out completely. Therefore, you must control the temperature carefully

Temperature inside the kettle depends, assuming there’s a fire of some sort in the kettle, upon the amount of air you allow into the kettle during cooking.  The fuel burns faster if it has more oxygen available, and burns more slowly if there’s less oxygen available.  The trick is allowing just enough air into the kettle so that your fuel smolders instead of flaming.

As to temperature control, I think it helps to have a basic understanding of the physics of gases, and of how gases at different temperatures interact.  It’s not very difficult, so please bear with me while I try to explain it.  Alternatively, if you’re really not all that interested in explanations, you can simply skip the next three paragraphs.  You won't miss anything important if you do.

Okay.  We all know that hot air rises, right?  Well, air is a mixture of different gases (collectively, gas), and our observation is true of all gas.  A gas, be it air or any other gas, that is hotter than a surrounding gas, be it air or any other gas, is displaced by the surrounding gas.  The reason this happens is because the hotter gas molecules have more kinetic energy than molecules of the cooler gas.  That is, while molecules of any gas are always in motion, molecules in the hotter gas fly around faster and collide with each other more often, and thus are farther apart, on average, than the molecules of the cooler gas.  The result is that the hotter gas is less dense (it weighs less, or has less mass, per unit volume) than the cooler gas in the vicinity of it, and is displaced by the cooler gas.  This displacement happens because the cooler gas, being more dense than the hotter gas, and therefore heavier per unit of volume than the hotter gas, is drawn under the hotter gas by the Earth’s gravity, and the less dense hotter gas is displaced upward.  (This is analogous to oil floating on water because water is heavier per unit volume than oil.)  The net effect is an upwardly-directed flow, or current, of gas.  Moreover, in general, the greater the difference in temperature between the hotter and the cooler, the greater the current,&bnsp;or rate of flow.  In a barbecue kettle, it is this gas current which drives the smoke, which is not a gas but is composed of particulate matter, up and out of the exhaust vent/damper in the lid, flavoring the meat along the way.

Incidentally, the above explanation is somewhat of an oversimplification.  Firstly, combustion is a chemical reaction, and gases of combustion have compositions that are different from those of atmospheric gases.  Thus individual molecules of combustion gases may (and do!) have masses that are different from those of individual molecules of the gases that make up the Earth’s atmosphere.  It would follow that equal volumes of the gases of combustion and atmospheric gases may have different masses at a given density.  Also, my explanation, strictly speaking, applies only to gases that are unconfined; that is, gases that are free to change volume by expanding and contracting.  A kettle, however, can be reasonably regarded as a confining vessel.  Nevertheless, pressure of magnitudes commonly associated with confined gases are not present in back-yard barbecue kettle.  Consequently, the general idea, that a mixture of cooler gases displacing a mixture of hotter gases causes an upward gas current, still applies.

Are you still with me?  All right, then.  In a barbecue kettle, hot gases get that way because the fuel burns, and the amount of heat depends upon the rate at which the fuel burns, which in turn depends on the amount of air present – the more air, the hotter the fire.  But by the same token, the less air admitted into the kettle, the cooler the fire burns because there is less available oxygen.  Thus you control the rate of burn, and the amount of heat thus generated, by controlling air flow into the kettle.  To control air flow, you adjust the dampers.

Now, what exactly is a damper, anyway?  The word damper has many meanings, but for our purposes, a damper is merely a mechanical device for varying the size of a ventilation opening in the kettle.  It’s a movable piece of metal attached to the kettle in such a way that is adjustable so that openings in the bottom and lid, respectively, of the kettle, openings which admit air or which exhaust combustion gases, can be fully open, fully closed, or partially open.  Two dampers, one on the kettle itself and the other on its lid, are each mounted in close contact with, and snuggly attached to their respective parts.  The closeness of fit is intended to prevent the leakage of intake air into, and the leakage of exhaust gases out of, the kettle.

With a little practice, the volume per unit time, or current intensity, of both intake air and exhaust gases, can be controlled fairly precisely.  The trick is to balance the volume-per-unit-time of intake air and the volume-per-unit-time of exhaust gases,nbsp;which is always greater than the volume-per-unit-time of intake air because there's more matter in the exhaust gas, and have the fuel smolder instead of burn. This is not as difficult in practice as it might seem.

Now, after what I just wrote, and with me being one of those engineering types and all, you might think that I use all sorts of fancy, complicated, and expensive scientific instruments, such as digital thermometers, pressure gauges, flow meters, etc., to get my fire regulated precisely.  Well, I don't.  I'm not that anal-retentive.  Nope. I just eye-ball it; here's how.

What I do is, after the drip-pan's in and I've arranged (as described in yesterday's post) my fat wood and hardwood chunks on either side of the drip-pan, I open the bottom (intake) damper fully and light the fat wood.  Then, when the hardwood chunks are fully in flame, I open the (exhaust) damper on the kettle lid fully and place the lid on the kettle, tightly so it seals good.  Next, I adjust the intake damper until the flame disappears.  I determine this by looking through the exhaust openings in the lid at the fire, i.e, by eye-balling, to see if the flames have disappeared and the fuel is smoldering.  When the fuel is smoldering, I remove the lid, throw my pork shoulder onto the kettle's rack over the drip-pan, replace the lid, and adjust the exhaust damper so it covers about half the total area of the openings.  At this point, I'm barbecuin'!

Tomorrow, I'll get to the "meat" of the matter, and describe in detail how I barbecue a pork shoulder using a cooking kettle.

Happy cooking!