Looking for a new hobby, a new way to cook, something a little bit different to try out? If you’ve managed to stumble across this article, then you’re probably interested in learning how to smoke meats at home expertly. The Low and Slow phenomena is an integral part of learning how to cook meats to their delicious best and involves – yes – cooking them very slowly, over many hours, at a lower temperature. Usually, when we are cooking on a stovetop or in an oven we are cooking for mere minutes, or a couple of hours at once. However, this is not the way that we go about smoking or barbequing meats in a charcoal grill. The low and slow method means many, many hours spent cooking the meat – often in the region of between 6 and 12 hours. This will, of course, depend on both the type of meat as well as the cut and size. The bigger the slab of meat, the more time that it will need cooking. Plus some cuts of meat lend themselves better to slow cooking than others.
If you are cooking things like hamburger patties and chops then you won’t want to slow cook them – these are best left to grilling. It’s those bigger cuts of meat that really work best when you’re slow barbeque cooking. The low and slow method of barbequing takes time and effort to master. On your first foray into this style of cooking, you will want to be able to tend to your barbeque at all times. When you get more advanced, some people choose to also do other tasks while they have their meats cooking for hours on end. If you are smoking the meat, you even need to prep your wood chips before starting the cooking process – it really is quite involved. You can do this by placing them in cold water an hour or two before you put them on the fire. You’ll also need to prep your meat with rubs and salting etc. which generally requires a few hours to sit before you put the meat on the fire. Plan on having a couple of hours of time in which you’re going to prepare before you even start cooking – this is an all-day activity. The benefits of cooking low and slow are that at the end of cooking your meat will positively melt in your mouth. This is because all the underlying structures, fats etc. in the meat will have liquefied and merged into the meat itself – leaving it wholly juicy and delicious. Looking for woods to put on your barbeque to smoke your meat in a range of delicious flavours? Check out our logs and chunks of firewood bags– we deliver too.