Smokin'

This past Monday, when I was working from home, I had the smoker going....multi-tasking actually!  I got all prepared the day before, and managed to take almost everything out in one tray load....

In the picture below, starting at the "top", you see a cookie cooling rack loaded up with peppers.  Now you normally smoke ripe jalapenos to make chipotles, only I don't have a TON of ripe jalapenos right now...but I DO have a lot of ripe serranos.  Hey, if you can smoke one, why not smoke the other?  Each of these peppers has been washed, and was snipped open with scissors at the stem-end, per Chicken Thistle Farm's recommendations...  (Thanks Andy!)

The peppers are sitting on a bowl of smoked mesquite wood - enough to get me through 3 or 4 changes of the wood.  The wood typically "burns up" in about an hour, give or take, and has to be dumped and replaced with more soaked wood to keep the smoke going.

Under the wood is a little toaster oven tray full of kosher salt.  Ever used smoked salt in something?  The brisket recipe I use calls for a couple tablespoons in the rub, so by smoking a bunch now, I'm all ready for the next time I need to make brisket (I ran out of previous smoked salt this time!)

Under, and just to the right, of the peppers is a small plastic container with the Dallas Dandy rub the brisket recipe calls for.  Some of the rub goes in the marinade the night before, and some (what you see here) gets patted on top as the meat goes in the smoker.  The rub recipe is just 2 T each black pepper, smoked salt, paprika, chili powder and brown sugar....stir 'em up, and keep it on hand for stuff!

To the right of the rub are some ingredient that go in the tray above the smoking wood - a couple beers, a chopped up onion, and the ends of a couple heads of garlic, cut in half to expose their innards.  I also ran out to the garden and grabbed a handful of parsley to stuff in the tray.  Unfortunately all my rosemary, thyme, sage etc got smothered by other plants and died off...so I'm limited on herbs right now.

And with all that talk of smoking a brisket, you KNOW I've gotta have A BRISKET, right?  Not much to look at here - it's a 12 lb slab of meat, cut in half, both stuffed in a 2 gallon zip lock bag, which is down in a garbage bag, and that's in a soup pot.  The marinade (which I only doubled, but probably could've trippled AND spiced up more!) is in there with it - it's got stuff pureed together like onion, Dallas Dandy rub, beer, liquid smoke, vinegar, oil, chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and I forget what else...  The meat marinated for a minimum of 18 hrs.

After smoking for about 5 hours or so, the meat, salt and peppers came out of the smoker.  My dad's thoughts are that the meat's probably not going to absorb much more "smoke flavor" after that time, and that you're just aiming to get the meat tender from that point on - and why go to all the work (and expense!) of swapping out burned up wood with fresh wood if it's not going to add much.  So the meat got wrapped in foil and thrown in a 350 oven for about another 5 hours, and the peppers (which you see here - definitely not fully dried out) got moved to the dehydrator.

Here's the smoked salt.  Does it look pretty?  Nope!  But it sure smells good!  This gets transferred to a glass jar and stored for use in recipes.

And here's the meat, fresh out of the smoker, ready to get wrapped in foil, tossed in the Dutch oven and baked.  The scorchy looking stuff on top is the rub that got added on just as it went in the smoker...

And here's the meat after another five hours - lemme tell ya, as good as this smells and tastes, shredding the meat is my least favorite part.  It's always soooo hot that by the time you're done, you feel like your hands are cooked, even if you let some of the meat cool on the cutting board while you work with the previously "cooled" stuff.

I should've weighed the end result - I  know 12 lbs of meat (plus fat) went in, and I  know a LOT of fat gets lost in the process....I don't even know if there was a full 6 lbs of meat left after the whole process...but it's such a good, filling, rich meal that you really don't need to eat a lot of it at once.  We each had a serving for dinner, I had some for lunch the next day, there's probably two more servings in the fridge, and then there's three bags in the freezer, and each of those probably have 4 servings?  So that's, what, about 17 servings?  Maybe more?  I want to say I paid $14 for the whole thing?  I don't think that's too bad in the long run...

And finally, here's the peppers after they've been drying in the dehydrator all evening/night.  I was smart - never having dehydrated peppers before, I decided to play it safe and set the dehydrator out on the deck...and BOY was it spicy smelling whenever you went outside!!  Heck, the next afternoon the whole downstairs STILL smelled like smoke and spice!!  Anyhow, all of these guys got jammed into a glass jar and stuffed in the freezer for when we need to add a little heat and flavor to something like chili....let's hope they're good!

We both agreed that this particular batch of brisket, while VERY tender and tasty, wasn't AS smoky/spicy as the batch that I made up for the big "Eat Local-ish" cookout a couple months back. Hmm....definitely gonna have to work on that for next time! ;-)