SMOKING HOT SUMMER

Food smokers are the coolest thing in the garden this year – so Tom Parker Bowles decides to ditch the barbecue and have a...

LOW and slow. The art of American barbecue, where cheaper joints of meat such as ribs, brisket and shoulder of pork are hot-smoked over indirect heat and gradually transformed into soft, smoke-scented magnificence… Down in the American south and south east, it’s more religion than a mere technique. A decade back, there was no more than a handful of ‘que’ restaurants over here. And home smoking was for expats only. Now, you can barely move for second-rate pulled pork, and desiccated racks of ribs.

Luckily, there’s a wide range of home smokers on the market to enable you to have a true taste of the barbecue belt.

The key is maintaining a constant temperature of about 110 to 125C, over a long period.

I tested all those featured with baby back ribs (from the everreliable donaldrussell.com), and marinated them for five hours in a dry rub (there are endless recipes online, plus lots of pre-mixed ones to buy. I like Butt Rub, from Amazon). They were smoked, naked, for three hours, basted with apple juice, then cooked for a further two hours while wrapped in foil. Finally, a decent barbecue sauce was slathered on every 15 minutes for an hour.

The end result should not fall apart, but have a good, firm texture – meat that comes off the bone with the minimum of bite. Better still is the smoke ring, a pinkish tinge to the meat that shows the smoke has truly penetrated. Acquire that blessed ring and you’ve mastered the art.

Cheap and cheerful, but this is more suited to smoking fish on a riverbank than great hunks of pork. In fact, you’d be pushed to slip in a chop. The smoke comes from sawdust and gives a very intense flavour, even though you only put the fish in for...