Smoking at home

Having officially attained middle age, I’ve decided to make some changes in my life. For example, I recently concluded it was long past time for me to start smoking.

I’m aware of all the implications. I know about the icky ash, the smelly clothes, the banishment to the outdoors. Above all, I know it will have a huge effect on the way food tastes, but that’s the whole point.

Don’t argue with me, because I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to start smoking, and I think I’ll begin with a chicken. If that goes well, I’ll try ribs next. Eventually, I hope to attain the backyard barbecue holy grail, the much-coveted smoke ring.

Smoking food at home goes against the grain of today’s breakneck fast-food lifestyle. I thought it would feel good to tap the brakes and eat more slowly. Plus, a hearty dose of anticipation will whet the appetite and heighten the appreciation for the critter that provided all that yumminess.

Once I had committed to becoming a smoker, the next step was deciding what type of smoking apparatus to acquire. Google revealed a wide variety of smokers that used an assortment of heat sources, from electricity to propane to charcoal. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was even a super-deluxe fast-cooking model that featured a military-grade flamethrower.

I know a guy from Texas who made his own barbecue rig by splitting an old 500-gallon propane tank in half. His outfit was large enough to accommodate almost anything, up to and including an adult rhinoceros. I could have followed his lead and built a similar smoker, but I decided we didn’t need that much capacity.

So, I went to our local home improvement megastore and purchased an offset firebox smoker, a model that can use either charcoal or wood as its heat source. Tradition certainly had something to do with that decision, but the biggest factor was having an excuse to play with fire.

The new smoker came in a box that had “some assembly required” printed on its side. The manufacturer wasn’t kidding.

The assembly instructions were along the lines of: “Step One: Find a deposit of iron ore. Step Two: Smelt the iron ore, forge it into steel and roll it into a sheet three feet wide by 1/16th of an inch thick...”

It wasn’t quite that bad, but you get the idea. After just a few short hours and only a couple of skinned knuckles, I was ready to fire it up.

There are approximately a million choices that need to be made when you decide to start barbecuing: wet or dry, rub or no rub, whether to sip beer or wine while the meat cooks and so on.

One of the first decisions involves what sort of fuel to use. I decided to go “old school” and chose charcoal. I eschewed the type that comes in artificially uniform chunks, instead opting for lump hardwood charcoal. This was augmented by some seasoned hardwood firewood I had harvested from a tree that had been felled by a storm.

There’s a deep, primal appeal to cooking off the grid, to know you could continue to eat like a king even if our modern infrastructure suffered a total collapse. Did I mention you also get to play with fire?

My smoker was soon smoking, a wonderous bluish plume rolling lazily from its stack. I tossed an experimental chicken into the thing and began to wait.

And wait. And wait some more. One of hardest parts of backyard barbecuing is following the “if you’re looking, you’re not cooking” rule. But how can you resist peeking? Oh Lordy, just look at how the skin on that chicken has turned such a luscious mahogany brown!

Cooking a chicken on my smoker took just a few hours longer than going to a fast-food drive through, but the end products were worlds apart. My wife and our sons agreed: The chicken wasn’t just good, it was outstanding.

Encouraged, I decided to “level up” by throwing a rack of baby back ribs onto the smoker. I let my wife have the first sample when the ribs were done. They were so scrumptious that she nearly swooned; I thus discovered an entirely new method for sweeping a gal off her feet.

So, I’m now scouring the house in search of my next smoking challenge. There isn’t much left in the freezer, and those old sneakers behind the couch are beginning to look pretty tempting.

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve gleaned from this whole experience is this: Friends don’t let friends cook with fossil fuels.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at [email protected].