My Birthday BBQ Story

Birthdays are always a big deal at our house. My special day three weeks ago was no exception and somehow it ended up involving barbecue. (How did that happen?) Anyway, I gathered the goods, fired my Meadow Creek SQ36 Smoker, and cooked up a storm.

The latest (March) issue of StoryQue contains my story and a bunch of dazzling photos. I shared quite a few tips for beginners, including how I cooked and prepped everything. Here is a video from the magazine and the first part of my story:

As you may have heard, I had a birthday earlier this month, and I just had to cook some good barbecue. I’d like to talk about my day, what I cooked, and briefly how I cooked it. The whole experience was a little extreme but I had a great time.

My birthday was cold and snowy (although not according to northern standards :-). I can’t remember the last time we had snow on my birthday here in Tennessee. Since I don’t have a very nice covered area to cook in, I pulled my smoker into the yard. During the first part of the cook, wet snow was coming down, making my charcoal bag, smoker, and camera wet, and because I had left my table on the back porch, it was icy on top, so my pans wanted to slide around.

To make it interesting, I decided I’m going to do a variety of meats, not just ribs or just chicken. I ended up working so much on my day off, I felt like having another birthday to take it easy.

I cooked on my Meadow Creek SQ36 offset smoker and fired it with 100% hardwood charcoal briquettes and apple wood. As you will see in the pictures, some of my meat turned out really dark. Before you judge me for overcooking my meat, let me say those ribs were absolutely delicious—likely the best I’ve ever eaten. And I am pretty picky when it comes to ribs. Even my wife loved them and said, “It should be illegal to cook such good food. It might make people sin!” And she is slightly hard to please when it comes to smoked ribs too. 🙂

If you’ve mastered smoking meat, you know that more smoke makes the meat darker. Less smoke lets you fully cook the meat without turning it black. Backing up a step to fire management—if you add too much fuel (wood or charcoal) to the firebox, you have to shut down your vents, which gives your fire less air, which gives you more smoke. Another factor is your fuel. If you are cooking with a lot of wood instead of mostly charcoal, you will end up with more smoke.

So that’s what happened on my birthday. I gave it a bit too much fuel during part of the cook and used a lot of apple wood because my charcoal bag was empty and I have plenty of smoking wood on hand. It wasn’t a big deal when it was fresh, but the smoke flavor gets stronger in the fridge and some of my leftover ribs and moink balls were a bit too smoky by the time we reheated them in the oven. Regardless, it gave me another round of experience in fire management and those ribs were tender and tasty.

So what did I cook? I raided my brother’s meat freezer and got a pack of two pork butts and four slabs of St. Louie pork ribs. These came from Sam’s Club or a wholesale meat supplier, so the quality was very good. My wife picked up a whole chicken at Piggly Wiggly and some bacon. We used a pound of grass-fed beef from the freezer and made some moink balls. I also made a couple packs of Italian Sausages I had picked up at Costco.

As you can tell, it was quite a feast. For some reason or another, I was in slow gear that morning and didn’t get any meat on the smoker until 8:00. I waited to prep all my meat until that morning which didn’t help.

Following are notes and pictures of the meats I cooked on my birthday.

Want More?

You can find the rest of the story in the March issue of StoryQue. If you have an iPad, install the StoryQue app or search the App Store for StoryQue. Inside the app, tap Subscribe to get a FREE 30-day trial. You’ll get the latest issue free and any issues published during your trial.

If you don’t have an iPad, don’t stone me. You can get a PDF edition here.

Hope you enjoy the video and my story.

Have fun,

Lavern Gingerich

Tags: sq36 smoker

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 26th, 2013 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Good Reading, Tips and Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.