Three Easy Steps to the Perfect BBQ

To a purist, BBQ is all about slow cooking. This usually includes using a smoker or a grill with a tight fitting lid and large surface. You need to position the food a short distance away from the heat. To achieve this, you could trying moving around some briquettes or lighting the fire on one side only. This produces a section of low heat that lets you implement the first of three steps to a perfect BBQ: infusing.

With infusing, your objective is to get all of the flavorful ingredients into the meat before the surface layer is cooked sufficiently to seal the inside. The rub, sauce, fat and juices mix with the smoke and heat to produce a complex interaction inside the meat. Both surface and interior fats melt away and the particles become part of the external layer. The conditions are now perfect for the flavor compounds to spread. Some killer BBQ is right around the corner.

During the second step, the actuall cooking happens, and this usually takes a while. As the interior temperature of the meat climbs, proteins break down and become amino acids. Sugars change their composition and spread their sweetness. Enzymes get active, and salt becomes ionized. The outcome of all this chemical activity is the transformation of a hunk of meat into a savory main course.

If you've added any wood to the fire, it will impart a smokey flavor to the meat during this stage. The surface of the meat becomes sealed and the inside juices are trapped; as they heat up they alter their composition. The meat will spend most of its cooking time in this phase. The temperature has to be lower than what you'd use indoors to cook.

Once the meat's inside temperature reaches 200F, it's time to take it off the BBQ grill or smoker.

In the third step, the meat continues cooking. As it cools, the internal heat is still high enough to continue to affect the meat. Your meat can tenderize even further during this stage, resulting in a mouth watering piece of meat.

When the temperature drops below 165F, it's ready to serve. Make a cut to check the color. Beef should be a dark red, and chicken should have become white and any juices should now be clear. If it's pork, it should be white with a gray tinge. The taste should be subtle and it should have an easy to chew consistency.

And there you have it: the perfect BBQ.

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