Sunday, September 11, 2005

Smokin'

I've found that the kind of cooking I get really excited about is the Big Project style of cooking. Not in the sense of doing something really elaborate and sophisticated that looks pretty on the plate, but rather in the sense of doing something that takes a hell of a long time to cook. It's a lot of fun to cook like this, because it makes the meal feel really special and there's a lot of technique to learn, but it's not too practical in day-to-day living.

Homemade pasta was the first thing I got interested in this way; there's something weirdly satisfying about spending a couple of hours combining flour and eggs to make something that you can normally only get if you open a factory-sealed bag. Fresh pasta has a texture you just can't get with factory-made. Al dente has a whole different meaning.

Gumbo's another. All that roux and Trinity and everything takes a good long time to put together, and if you do it right (I still haven't quite got the hang of it) it's sublime.

More and more, though, I'm finding that barbecue really satisfies that cooking project urge that I get. Brisket in particular scratches that itch. There's just something so great about taking an inedible piece of meat and transmuting it into Holy Food by smearing spices on it and cooking it for 14 hours.

14 hours is a damn inconvenient amount of time to spend tweaking the vents on a smoker, though. Particularly considering that if you want to have it for dinner, you need to get it on the heat somewhere before 4 AM and monitor it for most of a day. So it's pretty great to have a few quick-smoke recipes in your back pocket that you can pull out when you want to smoke, but you can't plan two days in advance.

The current favorite quick smokes in our house are smokeburgers and chicken snaps.

Smokeburgers are so good I can't believe I'd never had them before this year. Grilled burgers suck by comparison--the patties have to be really thin or they won't cook well, and they tend to dry out during cooking. By contrast, you can pat together an incredibly thick burger patty (1" or so), smoke it for an hour, and it'll be cooked all the way through but still be super-moist and nicely smoky to boot.

Chicken snaps are just little slices of chicken breast that you put a dry rub on for 20 minutes and then slap in the smoker. They cook in 30-45 minutes and taste fantastic, although given how lean they are, there's more of a tendency to dry out.

It's possible to prepare a really tasty meal in about 90 minutes total with these two recipes, and they really couldn't be much simpler.

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