You like chicken? Maybe a good old-fashioned burger? Maybe you’re vegetarian? All good, come on over. I’ll unholster my Outdoorsman 5000 Cordless Infrared Charcoal Lighter, and we’ll hit some of this Devil’s Dick® Jumbo Hardwood Texas Charcoal with a beam of air clocking in at about 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ll get that charcoal white hot in under six seconds, then chill for a while as I tell you about my grill. Then we’ll figure out what we wanna throw together for a simple, rugged meal.
No matter what we decide on eating during our outdoorsy lo-fi hang, I’ll be smoking it with rough-hewn hunks of Barefoot Bobby’s Premium Aged Small Batch Bourbon Barrel Chunks from Louisville, as well as a hand-picked selection of maple. What can I say, I’m a hippie. If you’d rather have cherry, alder, mesquite, or apple wood, just say so. I like to keep it simple, but I’m open to anything.
I’m one of these freaks who keeps it down to earth. About as fancy as it’s gonna get around here is my double-walled fully ceramic Tru Frontiersman Smoker and Grill, into which I’ve dropped a sweet custom stainless steel cooking grate from a fabricator in Memphis.
I replaced the stock temperature gauge with a Primal Forage® internal bluetooth thermometer so we’ll know what’s actually going on when it comes to holding our temp. I put a better intake vent and chimney on, so we can drill down on controlling the heat and smoke. Other than that, I’m a dude who opens the box, screws on the legs, and lights the damn thing! Total caveman.
Couple weeks ago, a buddy of mine was like, “Come on over to the house and we’ll throw something on the grill.” I go, “What kind of grill?” He says, “I don’t know, it’s a barbecue. We’ll make some burgers or salmon or something.” I go, “Uhhhh, yeah… you should just come over here.”
He gets over to my house, we’re in the kitchen, and he goes, “Oh, man, I forgot to bring this dry rub I bought, it’s really good. What kind do you have?” As if I’m gonna blow ten bucks on store-bought rub when I can just drop sixty dollars on celery seeds, mustard seeds, smoked paprika, sea salt, red and white peppercorns, coconut sugar, and Mountain Mike’s Cold Iron Pressed Small Batch Hatch Chile Pepper Flakes from New Mexico. Then just basically another twenty bucks for a simple stainless steel shaker, and I’m good to go. My buddy just looks at me like, “What the…?” I go, “Look, man, you’re dealing with a bohemian burnout here. I create my own dry rubs, okay?”
We walk out to the Tru Frontiersman with some chicken. When we get out there, he grabs my infrared cordless and goes, “What’s this?” I see his thumb going for the button. I throw down the chicken and dive like Iron Man, flying toward him in midair, total slow motion like, “Nooooo, doooon’t, messsss aaarrroouu…” I tackle him, and the thing goes flying out of his hands before anything can go wrong.
We get up, and I’m like, “Sorry, but did you want a concentrated stream of almost two-thousand-degree air five inches from your curious face? Let’s just hang, keep it simple, and break bread together, man.”
The chicken’s holding at 249.7 on the nose, a nice thin translucent blue stream of bourbon barrel and toasty maple smoke coming out of the Mike’s Razorback anodized chimney vent I put on there. Razorback’s set to 1.5 and the Sasquatch Quatro Grandé roto-molded cold air intake is set to 2.4. The chicken smells amazing.
I open the app on my phone and double-check our smoke density, and it’s perfect at 120 pcsf. Out of nowhere, my buddy goes, “What kind of barbecue sauce do you have?” I just stand there like, “Please, god. Jim thinks I buy barbecue sauce at the store. Come into me right now and grant me patience.” I’m not even religious, I’m spiritual, but Jim’s somehow made a simple barbecue into this thing where I’m like, “God help me.”
The chicken turned out great, and it was an awesome hang. We got to catch up, talk about old times, and have a few laughs. I’ve got a seven-pound pork shoulder going on the grill tomorrow for fourteen hours at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit with oak.
Swear to god, I could quit everything and just live on the side of a mountain somewhere.