I Will Miss This When They’re Making us All Eat Soy

I am learning (Or is it “learing”?) more about the fine art of barbecue.

The other day I smoked a pork butt using my new Weber Smokey Mountain smoker, and it was so good, it changed my understanding of what barbecue could be. My old Smokin-It electric smoker is a good machine, but the WSM gave me superior texture, excellent bark, and much more smoke flavor, which is the main reason smokers exist.

I cut squares into the fat of the butt and smoked it fat side up with a rub and some homemade vinegar sauce. The side of the butt with the fat was really something. Chewy bark combined with fat that had a texture sort of like a soft, delicate cheese.

I decided to see what it would be like to smoke a fattier cut, so on our last Costco mission, I got myself a slab of pork belly, the stuff bacon is made from. It was about $38, and I would say it was ample for four meals for my wife and myself. Maybe 6.

I did the same thing I did with the butt. Scored the fattiest side, put the other side down, applied my rub, took the water pan out of the smoker, and smoked the meat directly over the coals. I used hickory chunks. I tried to keep the temperature at 300°, but I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I only got close to that temperature during the last half-hour or so. The rest of the time, I was down around 240-250°.

I smoked until I got an internal reading of 165°, and then I applied the sauce and put the meat in the oven on a broiler pan at 300°. I took it out at 200°.

The butt was dryer, and when I put it in the oven, I covered the pan with foil to keep the butt from getting too dry. The belly was a lot wetter, so I didn’t use foil.

Was it good? Yes. Wonderful. Same bark. Same flavors. Lower ratio of the good stuff to the best stuff. It could have been a little juicier, but it wasn’t dry. It was so good, I could not make myself put sauce on it after it was cooked. The vinegar sauce I applied during cooking was very thin, so the finished meat did not look like it had sauce on it. The sauce went into the bark and flavored it.

I believe this meat will be excellent for sandwiches, although it’s so rich, I think they will have to be small.

Brisket gets a lot of love from pitmasters, but truthfully, this pork belly was better than any brisket I had ever eaten. I can’t say that means pork belly is generally better than brisket, though, because recent experience has taught me that I can’t judge meats based on the past. I have to run them through the WSM to see if I’ve been missing anything.

Next time, I plan to do a better job of keeping the heat high. I think the low heat gave the water too much time to get out of the meat. I used to think barbecue always meant 200-225°, but that was wrong.

I now have a stainless aftermarket door on the smoker. The Weber door is widely hated because it bends and lets too much smoke out. The door I bought will not do that, and it has a little hook on the inside so I can hang it on the smoker when the door is off. It came as a set of parts, and assembling and adjusting it was a big pain, but it works now.

I’ve been learning more from Harry Soo, the prizewinning pitmaster who filled his house with trophies using WSM smokers. I plan to do more of what he does. He uses a lot more wood, and he puts it under his charcoal. Other pitmasters say to avoid lump charcoal for various reasons, but he uses it, so I will, too.

He has an electronic gadget hooked up to a blower that connects to smoker bottom vents. It checks the temperature and blows the right amount of air toward the fire to keep the temperature within a narrow range. I don’t see myself trying that. The food is so good already, I don’t see the point. Maybe I’m wrong.

It’s nice to be on the path to better barbecue, because as people who are trying to limit carbs and get a lot of protein, it gives us pleasant options. We have been eating a lot of prime Costco strips as well as that gorgeous red Costco frozen shrimp, but you can’t live on that stuff every day.

Bottom line, I am claiming barbecue is health food. Yes. Health food.

Definitely.

We found a really neat product: Walmart Great Value frozen mixed vegetables. It’s a combination of corn, green beans, and carrots. You toss it in the microwave for 6 minutes, apply butter and salt, and you’re done. The quality is remarkable. You could mistake it for non-frozen. It’s not all that carby, and it’s quick and easy. Cost per bag: 97 cents. Works with barbecue, steaks, and shrimp. It’s pretty neutral.

I see people with $4,000 offset smokers on Youtube, and the natural inclination is to wonder if I went too cheap with the WSM, but that’s irrational. Far as I can tell from researching, there is nothing an offset does better than a WSM, but they cost a lot more (for good ones), and they are a real pain to use.

I suspect offsets are obsolete. I think it’s just taking the world a long time to admit it. An offset is a really neat device, and it lets you enjoy the fun of standing over it all day and being the captain, steering it back on course as it veers off over and over, but really, if you don’t enjoy facing a smoker for 6-10 hours, why would you put yourself through that just to get the same food a $550 WSM will give you with little effort? Actually, you get better food, because you don’t make as many mistakes.

If Harry Soo can defeat the offset guys and the guys who use every other kind of smoker hundreds of times in contests, cooking several different types of meat, then the WSM has to be as good a smoker as there is. Unless there is something wrong with meat that wins competitions.

The small footprint is nice, too, and once I get casters and side handles on the smoker, storing it will be a joke. And because it’s built heavily and covered with age-defying porcelain, a WSM will last a lifetime. Soo has smokers he has used for a very long time.

A UDS seems like a bad idea all the way around. It does exactly what a WSM does. It’s very heavy. The paint burns off. It’s hard to clean. It’s very expensive. And a WSM will do things it can’t do.

I believe the big benefit of a UDS is that the adjustable air inlets are up high, so obese pitmasters don’t have to bend over.

I think offsets and UDS’s are popular mainly because of blind loyalty at this point. Best guess. Maybe I’m wrong. I think bricks and cement are best, but after that, I like the WSM.

The Smokin-It was a bad choice as a barbecue smoker, plain and simple, although it makes very good food most people would be thrilled with. It’s not that much easier to use than a WSM, and the meat flavor, while excellent, and the bark, will never compare.

Will I get rid of it? No. I am going to put an external temperature controller on it so I can use it for a wide range of temperatures, from very low to over 300°. There are things a Smokin-It can do better than a WSM. It can hold meat at a desired temperature in a humid environment for as long as you want, and it can be rigged up for cold-smoking. It can be used as a spare oven on holidays. It can keep side dishes warm. You can roast a turkey in one, although you will need to move it to the oven to brown the skin.

This is how it looks to me now. I hope I’m getting close to the truth.