Fundamental Rule or Matter of Local Style?

I have a Blogtalkradio show scheduled for tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern. I could not get 9:30. I plan to tell people how to make a perfect pulled pork sandwich, and I'm also going to tell you how to make pan con lechon with pulled pork. The pan con lechon recipe is absolutely sick. Possibly the best sandwich in the universe.

I got a comment on the Hoginator photo I put up a while back. I was thrilled that I was finally getting thick, reliable smoke, so I photographed it. In the past, I had sometimes had problems getting enough smoke to turn meat pink and season the outside of it. Adding the external smoke box totally changed that.

Here is the comment:

Dude, you have totally missed the point if you are trying to billow visible smoke with the hoginator. Great Q is made with clear or thin blue smoke at worst. You are coating your meat with condensed wood creosote - yuk!

The site referenced at the end of the quote was Karubecue.com. Haven't seen it. This is just a courtesy link. Update: I just looked. He sells some sort of barbecue cookers. Unfortunately, you can't find anything out about them by looking at the site.

Seems like a lot of sites that sell smokers and cookers are really bad and useless. Example: a few months back, a new company offered me a free steel caja china, but they disappeared. I was disappointed; I thought it would be fun to work with them and write about the product. I checked out their site to see what their story was, and it was pretty awful. Meanwhile, the La Caja China people have a very good site, and they are absolutely kicking ass in the market, selling tons of caja chinas and developing new products, including a smoking caja china which Val and I were supposed to help with, although Val didn't follow up. It's too bad entrepreneurs put up lame sites to advertise good products. Without a decent storefront and photos and information, you might as well be in solitary confinement, sitting on a pile of unsold inventory with both thumbs up your ass. Klose has a nice site. And of course, they're raking in money and getting lots of market share. Making a simple product anyone with a few tools can make.

I responded to the smoke remark in a comment, but I'll amplify it here.

The Hoginator is a wonder. Very convenient to use, infinitely controllable, reasonably capacious, and so on. But the original version without an external smoke box didn't always smoke hard enough. I had to watch it too much, and I had to screw with foil-wrapped wood chips and chunks, and sometimes the meat just was not smoked enough. With the external box, all those problems are history. I can cook at 325 degrees with no smoke. I can smoke at 95 degrees. I can have as much or as little smoke as I like. And I don't have to worry about preparing the wood. I dump chips in a bucket of water, and they're ready to smoke in maybe 15 minutes. No foil, no chunks, no BS. Although chunks work, too, if they're soaked or wrapped.

I've been using the external box for a while now, and I always smoke as heavily as I can until the outside of the meat looks right. Then I quit adding wood and let the meat cook without smoke. I get pink, tender, juicy, smoky-tasting meat. I know from past experience that if I used "clear or thin blue smoke," none of my smaller items (ribs, wings, chicken) would be smoked properly by the time they came out of the box. I find it takes at least four hours of good, heavy smoke to get the flavor I want. So while I don't pretend to be a barbecue expert, I don't see how this guy can be right. If the meat isn't pink and full of smoky flavor, with a little smoke residue on the outside, it's not what I consider barbecue.

Also, thin smoke should be chemically identical to thick smoke except for the concentration, so I don't see how it can taste different. Seems to me that the only difference would be the amount of gas and particulates that hits the meat in a given amount of time.

Now that I think about it, how can you smoke anything with "clear" smoke? Isn't clear smoke the same thing as air?

As for the meat turning black, that doesn't happen unless I want it to. I like to stop at a nice dark brown, with bits of black here and there. I should also point out that according to actual experts--look it up--blackening is largely caused by sugar on the outside of the meat. I like sugar in my rub, so if I smoke my meat long enough, it will eventually turn black.

This guy is based in Texas, and when I lived in Texas, I had lots of really bland restaurant barbecue--like the stuff they sell at Bert's in Austin--that had no residue on the outside. Maybe that's what he likes, which is fine and dandy. It was like meat cooked in an oven, but in Texas they serve boiled corn and cheap dill pickles and mushy factory white bread with barbecue, and none of those things have any flavor, so I suppose lightly flavored meat makes sense in that context.

In any case, creating thin smoke is much easier than creating thick smoke, so you can always try it his way and see what you think. Buy one of his cookers and see what happens. Maybe you will see God. That's what cooking is all about. Do whatever makes you happy. Bert's is pretty popular, so obviously, not everyone insists on dark barbecue with a lot of smoke flavor.

I can't accept statements about cooking without asking myself if they make sense, regardless of who they come from. I'm always going to be skeptical of criticism that sounds "off," because barbecue chefs have a long history of running down other people's food just because it's different. Like I said in my book, barbecue is a religion, and it's full of intolerance. Foodies generally have that stuck-up, pedantic attitude, and it's why I hate them and want nothing to do with them and hope the earth swallows them. And the devil throws them in a lake of fire and makes them eat Vienna sausage.

If you've heard anything about thin smoke being better, or if you've actually tried it, chime in. I can't see how thin smoke will have any effect in the short time it takes to cook ribs, but I have been wrong before. Probably.

Anyhow, the show should be fun tonight, and I can promise you that the sandwich advice I'm going to give you works. Be there.

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I just sampled some of my pulled pork to see if I could detect bitterness or the flavor of creosote. I have a big bowl of pork in the fridge, and I started grabbing pieces out and eating them. I made sure I ate some of the blacker bits all by themselves.

I don't see the problem. The meat is tender and buttery-tasting, with plenty of smoke flavor. I couldn't detect bitterness at all. I had to force myself to put the bowl back and quit eating. It's even better than I remembered.

Maybe I'll slap a rack of ribs on the grill and use thin smoke for 6 hours and see what happens.