5 Beginner Smoking Tips from Rashad Jones, ‘Cue | . Master | FN Dish – Behind the scenes, Food Trends and Best Recipes: Food Network
If you’re a beginner to the world of smoked meats, there are a few things you need to know to positively impact your dishes and make your friends and family think you’re the pro! Here are some of my best tips.
1. Remember this is Culinary ART! The best art is when we create and express our emotions! Allow your personality, approach, ideas, and imagination to shine in whatever you’re smoking. Do you like spicy, sweet, salty, smoky or burnt? Whatever your answer, let it shine in your cooking.
2. Have fun! Food tastes better when whoever is cooking is happy and enjoying the experience. Most of the best meals we’ve ever had were probably cooked by someone who really expected to cook for us. Fun allows you to relax and connect with whatever you’re doing. Barbecue is a very laid back vibe. It’s taking care of a fire, charcoal, or whatever you’re cooking, sometimes for hours. If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right, and that definitely shows in how great your barbecue tastes.
3. Start with the low hanging fruit. If you are a beginner, my goal with these tips is for you to develop confidence as a grill chef. A great way to start is to slow cook a very forgiving meat like St. Louis. In general, pork chops have a large amount of intramuscular fat (aka marbled fat). This fat is really suitable for low and slow cooking styles. When the ribs are cooked, the muscle fibers containing fat, protein, water, and elastin (a protein that helps keep muscles supple) begin to relax and begin to transform into juicy, tender, melt-in-your-mouth barbecue! I developed my confidence in barbecue using this same approach to ribs.
4. Find Inspiration! Great art is fueled by great inspiration. Find some people in the world of barbecue on social media that you can search for. See photos and videos of their barbecue. Check the types of baked goods and/or smokes they are cooking. Check their cooking fuel (wood, coal, briquettes, pellets, etc.). I call this learning from images. There’s an old saying that says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” When my love of all things barbecue first began, I was like a sponge, absorbing as much of the content as possible. When I was first bitten by a barbecue beetle, I was (and still am) eager to learn how smoke plus the right heat, time and seasoning can turn a large, chewy piece of meat into several pieces. The best, if not the best. , bite meat ever. The answers to my questions are elusive. But inspiration led me to educate myself.
My barbecue hero is my wife’s Uncle Leon, aka Big Lee! I ate his food for the first time on November 24, 2011. It was Thanksgiving Day to be exact with my wife’s family in Delta – Greenwood, Mississippi. Uncle Leon cooked a great Thanksgiving dinner! But he also cooks barbecue. Barbecue is his passion. I helped him unload some beautiful smoked chicken and ribs from his custom smoker. I wasn’t serious about cooking back then, and barbecue meant nothing more to me than a hot dog or hamburger. But little did I know that the moments after he pulled the meat from the smoker would change my life. Literally. I took a bite of ribs and chicken, and something special happened to me… aside from a feast of wonderful flavors and textures dancing around my taste buds. Food touches my heart as well as all things great, from the heart can cook. To say I was blown away is an overstatement. That piece of food completely inspired me, and the fire of that inspiration lived and burned within me, propelling me to heights in the culinary world I could never have imagined. Find your inspiration!
5. Take your time and use it wisely! In many ways, barbecue is more like a marathon than a sprint. It’s my all-time favorite cooking style for this reason. Usually, cooking on a smoker takes many hours. So once your meat (or whatever else you’re cooking) hits the grill, you’ll have hours on hand until your dish is done. When I was just getting started, this was the time I used to document my progress. During this marathon, I will record the original weight of the meat, the weather conditions, the smoke temperature, the cooking time, etc. And I note how thick or thin the smoke is, what kind of wood. being used, etc. Documenting such a process gives you a huge advantage when your ‘suggestions’ start popping up amazingly. You’ll have those notes on hand so you can do your best to copy and adapt your process.
Watch the latest episodes of Master of’ Cue with Rashad Jones.
