I’m sitting here with a particularly acute case of the Mondays. Brains broken, nails filthy, my work clothes smell of that finest of hillbilly cologne – hickory smoke. It was a long journey into the heart of flavor country, and not without it’s perils, but, like any good journey, I can now sit satisfied on the other side of the conquest, comfortable in the knowledge that we properly courted and slayed the dragon presented to us.
Here’s the situation: two friends were getting married and asked that Matt and I prepare the food for the gathering. Estimates were about 150 people. So we picked up 3 briskets about 11lbs a piece, 4 10lb pork butts, and about 30lbs of breasts and thighs. Knowing that pulled meat is always tastier the second day we made the pork and chicken on Friday, leaving Saturday for cooking the brisket and serving the hungry masses. And, because we’re gluttons for punishment and I’ve got a germanic penchant for over-committing, we offered to brew a souvenir beer for all the attendees. We brewed up about 10 gallons of IPA and 5 gallons of a Mai Bock. That picture above is a point of pride for me, it’s our IPA with the custom labels adorned which had, over the course of the evening, become a very real part of Chicago’s weekending landscape. What more affirmation can a hack brewer desire than to have their precious beer rest upon a throne of concrete, cigarettes and industry? None I say.
What did we learn? If what can be considered learned is what can be expected to be practiced in the future, then we probably learned very little. But, at least at this point, so soon after the event, there were a few things that stick out as worth remembering for the future.
First off, those thermometers that come in the consumer level smokers are a joke. They don’t reflect any kind of accurate reading. Fortunately, Matt’s dad, Jim Shirley, who you might recall from an early OA post, bought us a Redichek Maverik Remote Smoker Thermometer
I think I’m going to try and pick up another remote temperature probe and try it out as the convenience is really hard to beat. The guys over at Salt & Fat recommended the OXO Good Grips Digital Leave-In Meat Thermometer
Of course, I could always do the right thing. And you know what the right thing is, don’t you? Spend a bunch of money on a sweet new gadget. Let’s say, a gadget like The Stoker!
The Stoker allows you to monitor your ambient temperature, your meat temperature and also is connected to a PID that are hooked up to blowers to automatically stoke your coals when your heat drops. But that’s not really the craziest part. It also has a web interface that allows you to automate your settings and thriving development community building new apps for the Stoker, apps that help you take diagnostics of your smoking session. Oh yeah, and it also interfaces with Twitter and Facebook to send you a message when your temperature goes high or your meat reaches it’s optimum temperature. Holy nerd balls, Batman! A smoking aparatus that you can run from your smart phone!! This is probably the coolest and nerdiest thing I’ve come across in a long while. I want! I want! The only thing that’s holding me back right now is that a) I don’t have a smart phone (come on Verizon and release that HTC Incredible) and b) the Stoker costs twice what our smoker actually cost us. There’s not much to it really, a couple thermocouples, a blower and a PID, I may just go ahead and build one for myself rather than spend the $280 on it. Though slothfulness is enticing as well…
But you know what we used to replace the broken probe on our Redicheck so that we could monitor the ambient temperature on our second smoker? A $5 liquid thermometer from Menards. That there is something for you gear heads to chew on.
Another thing we learned this weekend, pulling pork and chicken by hand is a job reserved solely for sucks. Fortunately, we had AJ and JohnnyK to help us out, but, even still, four people pulling 70lbs of meat took us over 3 hours. That shit was not fun. But, those 3 hours gave us plenty of time to discuss the design of a machine that would automate the meat pulling process should there not already be one in existence. Fortunately, however, there is a machine that automatically pulls meat already in existence. Oddly enough, it’s a concrete mixer that you can buy at Home Depot for just a few hundred dollars.
For those of you a bit more budget minded apparently the Bear Paws
As far as the beer goes we took our first pass at custom labels. I got turned onto the Beer Labelizer, a helpful app built to allow you to apply custom text to 4 different labels. Unfortunately, my favorite label they offer was ovular and I was not about to cut out 150 oval labels by hand. So I borrowed the labelizers color scheme and just built my own label with an image that one of the bride & groom’s friend had drawn of them. The labels were 3.5″x4″ and fit real nice on the bottle and, being rectangular, were real easy for AJ to cut out (thanks, pig!). I was able to get 30 full color sheets of sticker paper bought and printed at Kinko’s (or whatever it is now) for under $15 – awesome.
What else did I learn? Hmm, I learned, at least 5 times on Friday that when metal is close to heat it seems to actually absorb the heat and get hot itself and if you touch that metal your nerves send impulses to your brain that force you to make a face like your a retard getting a prostate exam. I learned I really like spending long days working on improbable projects with my friends, getting little sleep and waking up early again to keep working on them. I learned that it’s awesome to smoke cigarettes in the rain under a small shelter. And that there’s no better way to spend a Saturday night than eating meat, drinking beer, and celebrating two people falling in love.