Smoking Meat by Jeff Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

something that it shouldn’t, and you could be ingesting dangerous substances. You should also season your smoker if you haven’t used it in more than two years and after any general cleaning with soap or chemicals (see Cleaning Your Smoker, below).
    To season a smoker, simply spray a light coating of cooking oil on all inside surfaces. Then run the smoker through a normal cooking session, excluding the meat. That is, run it at 225° F using your favorite wood for smoke. This seasoning session should last approximately two hours. The smoker can then be safely used for smoking meat.
    Cleaning Your Smoker
    There are a few things you can do to keep your smoker clean from one smoking session to the next. As with any cooking device, the grate or cooking surface should be kept very clean. For this reason I recommend using a wad of foil or a grate brush to remove any loose material. You can then run the grate or cooking surface through the dishwasher on the pots and pans cycle. They’ll usually come out spotless. If it’s been a while since you last cleaned your grates and there are lots of stubborn bits of debris between the rails, you can place them in your oven and run it through a self-clean cycle (assuming the grates will fit in your oven). This ramps the heat in the oven up to about 900° F and burns off the debris. The grates should come out clean and shiny.
    I recommend deep-cleaning your smoker about once a year. Use a basic degreaser like Simple Green and a nylon scrub brush to remove as much of the grease and muck from the smoker walls as possible. For the more stubborn stuff, you may need to use a plastic putty knife as a scraper. Once everything is sparkling clean again and the inside has been well rinsed to remove all traces of soaps and cleaners, the smoker will need to be re-seasoned (see Seasoning a Smoker, previous page).
    Using a Smoker and Grill Together
    Many folks who get interested in the method of cooking meat over low heat are previously avid grillers. This can be advantageous, since there are still many uses for the grill while smoke cooking, and experience with higher heat can play a part in producing some really delicious food.
    The first application of a grill that comes to mind is finishing off chicken. Whole chickens do very well in the smoker, but the low and slow method of cooking tends to produce rubbery skin. For this reason, I recommend removing chicken from the smoker about 15 minutes before it is finished cooking, and using a hot grill to crispen the skin. This way you get the best of both worlds: slow smoked chicken that is tender and moist with crispy, delicious skin.
    You can also use the grill to prepare the vegetables or sides you are serving with the main entrée—a veggie stir-fry, for example, made in a pan or piece of foil with the sides turned up, or tomatoes brushed with olive oil and basil and placed directly on the grate. Some things are just better suited to the grill, and your job is to know what to grill and what to smoke low and slow.
    If your grill has a side burner, this is a nifty place to prepare a pot of barbecued beans or to warm up a sauce or marinade to brush onto the meat just before it is finished. There are so many options—you just need to be creative to see how much of the meal you can prepare outdoors. Not only does cooking outside make food taste better; it also keeps the heat out of the kitchen and, better yet, it keeps you out by the smoker where you probably want to be anyway.
    Logging Your Smoking Sessions
    Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of keeping notes. If you’re anything like me, you’ll say to yourself, “Yeah, I’ll remember that,” but then you don’t. The next day that info is long gone, overwritten by other data that is so much more recent and important.
    You’ve also no doubt heard the saying, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” Although this saying is often used to