The summer of barbecue

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2015 will go down in my memory for several things, but one part of it is barbecue. I’ve enjoyed cooking and grilling for a while, but never really got into real BBQ as much as I did this year.  It started off innocently enough, looking for good ribs, but after sampling the BBQ that my area of NJ had to offer, I was not happy. Some of you may be wondering what the difference in barbecue and grilling is, or a “cook out” or any number of terms applied to using fire, outdoor, to cook. What I am talking about is low and slow cooking over wood; food that is done when it is done, food that I can’t tell you how long to cook it for, food that I can’t tell you what temperature it has to be, food that is much an art to cook as photography.

I tried smoking a few things on the Weber kettle, but still wasn’t happy, so, around the end of June 2015, I bought a Weber Smokey Mountain to go along with my Weber kettle.

weber kettle and smokey mountain

Since then, I’ve been hooked and have tried the classics like brisket, pork butt (which is really a shoulder not a rump), ribs, both St. Louis Style Ribs and Baby Back Ribs (I prefer St. Louis style), beef short ribs, tritip, flat iron, Turkey and more.

triptip  Short Ribs Apple Rubbed Ribs

The summer culminated with a nice surprise, a podcaster and overall great guy, Victor Cajiao, invited me on his podcast, Terra Tech Podcast. I listened to Victor from his Typical Mac User podcast back when I was switching to them, or more accuretely, adding Macs into my arsenal. Over the years since then, we’ve exchanged tweets and messages on various things mac, photography and lately me making him hungry. I had a great time and conversation with him talking about my barbecue and grilling. Please have listen here:

TerraTech Podcast

And just because summer is just about over, I don’t plan on stopping the outdoor cooking, and the new challenges it brings on keeping that smoker low and slow on cold, windy winter days.

You can find more of my BBQ, Grilling and cooking photos on instagram.

A photo posted by Joseph Hoetzl (@jhoetzl) on

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