7/31/22 The Case For The Pellet Grill?

     Living in Texas, one can get a lot of crap for going against the norm.  For many, smoking a large piece of meat, such as brisket, can only be achieved by doing it the old-fashioned way.  These people would have you believe that unless you go and cut your own mesquite tree and run a barrel smoker, manually keeping the temperature around 220 degrees, you are cheating somehow.  I will give you that for a competition, sure, set a bunch of arbitrary rules and then make the contestants follow them.  Wife did this, she came up with the idea of running a barbeque competition when she worked in La Pryor, and she explicitly excluded pellet grills from competing.  In that situation, I get it, the pellet grill would have the advantage of needing very little human input, once it is set up.

    The last time I cooked for an outside group, I was met with the slight snicker of "did you smoke-smoke the briskets or did you cheat with a pellet grill?"  These were people I barely knew, and I volunteered to make and buy the two briskets and was still met with a little sauciness.  Happily, the day ended with tons of compliments, such as "this is the best brisket ever" and "I usually don't like eating the fatty part, but this one is going down like candy."

    I am starting to conclude these are cavemen people, they insist on doing things the hard way.  with my grill, I just make sure and have enough pellets, I keep at least 2-3 extra bags (each one is twenty pounds and run only around $13.99) at all times, so I can just start the grill, if we decide we want something cooked outside.  I am not even including the idea of grilling steaks and fajitas on Saturday and then smoking a brisket or ribs on Sunday on the same grill.

    This morning, I got up around 6:30am, hit the start button, set it to 240, and came inside to season the brisket.  The grill takes maybe 10 minutes, so by the time I am done seasoning the meat, the grill has done its job and gotten up to temperature.  I was then able to run to the HEB, clean the pool, and even organize the pantry while the grill has been doing the part of maintaining the temp at 240.  The hardes part, other than getting out of bed at 6:45am is then taking it out of the grill for a minute to wrap it in the pink butcher paper halfway through its smoking process.  That has been done, as of about 30-40 minutes ago.  At this point, I am just waiting until around 4:00-5:00pm to take it out and let it rest for a while before slicing it.