I have never had a baby. But now I understand.
I have spent the last several months of my life looking after a small, constantly needy child _ actually, it has only been a few hours, but it feels like several months.
It is a healthy 6 { pounder, and I have been tending to its every need, worrying about it, checking on it every few minutes to make sure it is doing fine. I don't want its temperature to rise above 200 degrees.
I am speaking here about a beef brisket. I thought that was obvious.
As I have mentioned previously, I indulged myself for a recent significant, round-number birthday by purchasing one of those expensive kamado outdoor grills that do everything for you except walk your dog. It's even bright red. I don't know anything that says Late Middle-Age Crisis like an expensive toy that is bright red.
One reason for getting it is that I wanted to use it to smoke a brisket. I lived in Texas for three years and, along with accumulating many friends, I acquired a permanent hankering for barbecued beef brisket. Brisket is easy to find now at just about every barbecue restaurant in the country, but I wanted to make my own.
This is not to say I had not tried in the past. On at least two occasions, I had smoked briskets on my old Weber grill. They were ... fine. A little tough, perhaps. But not notable enough to try it more than twice.
And that is why I wanted to cook a brisket on a grill that cost as much as a bad used car. This grill can cook at a low temperature all day long without adding more coals and, best of all, can maintain a desired temperature just as long.
Allegedly.
Actually, I have not had any problems getting the grill to keep a steady 425 degrees for as long as I have needed it, though that has not been much more than an hour. But getting it to stay at a steady 225 degrees for eight hours is something else.
If I blinked, the temperature shot up to 250 degrees. So I adjusted the vents in the top and bottom just a tad, a mere sliver of a tad, and then the temperature dropped down to 200 degrees.
But I'm not worried. At least the thermometer works.
It was this see-sawing, this yo-yoing that had me dashing out to the grill every 10 minutes to check on the temperature, like a nervous new father.
Not that the process had been smooth even aside from the fluctuating heat. I was frustrated from the very beginning because I did not have the wood I wanted to use for smoking.
In the south-central part of western east Texas, which is where I lived, the only wood used for barbecue is post oak, a smallish and unusually straight type of oak tree that grows all over the place there. It produces just the right flavor of smoke that makes an excellent beef barbecue.
But I could not find any post oak wood chips, so I ended up using mesquite _ another very Texan wood, though it has a distinctly different flavor. Only after I had been smoking my brisket for a couple of hours did I discover that the store where I bought my grill also sells chunks of post oak.
And then there is the problem with the cracked heat deflector. My grill came with a heat deflector shield that keeps whatever it is you are grilling from scorching or burning on the bottom. One month after I bought the grill, the heat deflector cracked from the heat.
I wrote to the company _ it was just a month old, the deflector was still under warranty _ and they said they would happily send a replacement.
I waited. And waited. And waited. OK, I only waited for a month, but I was eager to make my beef brisket. I wrote to them again (and then again), and finally they said they they would deliver the new one on a specific day. As it happens, that day _ today, as I write this _ was the very day I had planned to make the brisket.
If the heat deflector had arrived in the morning, everything would have been fine and I could have used it. It arrived in the afternoon.
Still, somehow, the brisket was cooked. I lovingly, if not obsessively, checked the temperature of the grill every 10 or 20 or 30 minutes for eight hours. And finally it was done.
I let it rest for another 45 minutes, then sliced it and ate it.
My little boy was delicious.
