During the Shutdown courtesy of the Corona pandemic I had plenty of time to thumb through old pictures and culinary journals that I keep of my travels to make me become nostalgic. I remember those early days of family road trips across country, the states to be exact, and how experiencing roadside barbeque in Texas sucker punched me in the tastebuds and placed an unforgettable imprint into my culinary conscience. I live so far away from that place now and I fondly remember and miss the dining experience of excellently smoked beef ribs dipped in a smoky vinegar based barbecue sauce running down my chin as I chomped my way to the rib bone. My sole intention was selfishly motivated to recreate that pleasurable unique culinary moment for myself and my family. Not so easy when you are a mad man when it comes to the details like I am. I come from a long culinary tradition of always take the the most time invested path to make your food great. Well I guess I could have bought one of those 349 shekel paper thin metal, chinese cookie cutter offset smoker toys. Yeh right!.. it surely would have lots of fails and would never have given me a glimmer of real barbeque in the end so.... hell no!!!
Too many variables to the art of smoking and if you enter a car race with a 76 Gremlin which is what you have here, you will be no where near the finish line when the race is over and it definitely will blow up when rear ended.
Now it was time to learn some more about Central Texas barbeque as I remembered it. So
I went through everything written on the internet about this American institution. I quickly weeded out the novices from the true pioneers. I also dug up Chris Hall,my old culinary school friend's phone number knowing that he ended up apprenticing to become a pit master in Central Texas many years ago at places like Stillwater Barbeque and The Granary. I started a long in depth conversation with Chris bleeding him of all his firsthand knowledge of becoming a pit master. Hell I even ended up with a subscription to Texas Monthly in the end. With my own professional culinary background and knowledge specializing in charcuterie and wood fire cooking, I got a good hand on the theories and principals. The next part of the equation was to build the right equipment to put these theories into a crafted practice.
`Practice makes extremely good barbeque'. I think that's how the saying goes. I even went to welding class to polish up on a lost art that I had once worked at in my early Santa Monica college days so I could help put together this instrument of fine smoke and heat. When all the welds were done and the sharp edges ground down and the flax seed oil was torched into the surface of the outside of our 6mm thick steel Texas stick offset smoker, I started the inaugural smoked brisket. With a well laid plan in effect I set out on the 12 hour tour but somewhere the Minnow was lost. In all honesty I hit somewhere on the outer rings of a marksman paper target. Heck at least it landed on the target somewhere and that was a start. If you get into a 1964 Ford GT40 for the first time you will be lucky not to crash into the rails and at least putter across the finish line. Learning the nuances of a finely built machine takes time and practice. Like a good scientist I recorded everything into a lab journal. I was learning for the first time ever on an original designed smoker that no one would know how to use unless they learned what this baby can do firsthand. I was like a young John Glenn as a test pilot but for Texas offset smokers. So after a few crash and burns, literally, we began to hum. I locked down the parameters of wood, temperature control, clean smoke and quality cuts of meat. That first bite of success was a watershed of good barbeque memories that drowned my senses and whisked me back to those summertime road trips. The birth of Aarons Barbeque was not far away. We made barbeque for friends and family and after a long test with those who did not hold back criticism we decided to offer our barbeque to the locals in our hood, Pardes Hana- Karkur. We hope you will enjoy, `one man's madness is another mans good barbeque'. I think that's how that saying goes.
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