Smoke

Smoking a whole turkey is little more work than roasting a bird, but it infuses the meat with a rich, woodsy flavor. All it requires is setting up a grill. Once that's done, the turkey's good to go—all it needs is a simple glaze made from hot-pepper jelly. The final glaze caramelizes on the skin and adds a sweet and sour heat to the smoky turkey.

What I love about wings is that you get a two-in-one treat when you eat them. Wings are great for weeknight cooking too, because they take very little time to prepare and cook.

In Texas, barbecue is about beef: specifically brisket, the cut by which any joint is judged. Brisket has become a favorite of restaurant chefs, too, hence the smoke ribbons and Hank Williams songs drifting out of restaurants as far away as Brooklyn. But can great brisket be made at home? I devoted a weekend to the task and learned that with a few key ingredients— salt, pepper, patience, and advice from Aaron Franklin, my neighbor and the pitmaster at Franklin Barbecue in Austin—swoonworthy results are doable. You just have to take the time—12 smoky hours. Brisket (from the cow's breast or lower chest) is rich in connective tissue, so it requires a low-and-slow process to relax the muscle into tender goodness—a pleasure that can't be achieved with a quicker method. Luckily, those first unforgettable bites are worth the weekend. So let's get started.

Beef brisket is one of the hardest meats to cook correctly. In Texas, this dish is a benchmark for how good a cook or restaurant is, and everyone has an opinion about how to do it right. Good food takes time, and this recipe will help you through the pitfalls of cooking a brisket. Don't ever steam your beef; it dries the meat and makes it tough. Applying a dry rub is important with large cuts of meat. Our BBQ Beef Coffee Cure is a select mixture of seasonings paired with an earthy dark-roasted ground coffee that complements the brisket. The salt and sugars in the rub will cure the outer portion of the brisket, leaving a hearty flavor and the smoke, charred crust called "bark."

We don't know where Bob Palmgren, head pitmaster and proprietor of RJ's Bob-Be-Que in Mission, Kansas, got the idea for smoked sausage in cornhusks, but we credit him for inspiring our own version. Bob features a pork sausage with chopped jalapeño peppers and other seasonings. Ours pays homage to the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who spent much of her creative life in northern New Mexico at a place called Abiquiu, taking inspiration from the local terrain. This one features a chicken sausage with chopped fire-roasted Hatch chile peppers and other New Mexico seasonings.

This recipe is excerpted from Cooked by Michael Pollan. Read more about the origin of this recipe in our interview with Michael Pollan.

Noah: We're always looking for alternatives to pork at Mile End, and this dry-cured lamb breast was an amazing meat discovery for me. You can use lamb bacon in pretty much any dish you'd use standard bacon or pancetta for: Italian peasant soups, potato salads, meat braises, pasta dishes, whatever. We finish our lamb bacon in a smoker, though at home I've cooked it in the oven and gotten great results; it just has a milder flavor. You can store the bacon in the fridge for many weeks.

Who says pigs can't fly? Take a few boneless pork chops, add some bacon and a little creativity, and Pig Wings are on the menu! The bacon adds great flavor and keeps the loin meat from getting dry. These look delicious and are a little unusual, so they make a fabulous smoked appetizer with barbecue sauce for dipping. The kids will love them.

A ham may be fully cooked and usually smoked as well, but another round in the smoker and a tasty glaze really take it to the next level. The apricot-soy combo here adds a sweet/salty taste to the outside of the ham. This recipe calls for a bone-in ham, but you can easily adapt it to any cooked ham. This is a great way to impress the family for the holidays and leave the oven available for other dishes.

Sausage-wrapped "Scotch" eggs are a tasty and interesting dish when breaded and fried in the traditional manner, but cooking them on the smoker makes a very special treat. The homemade sausage gets a nice crust on the outside and, if you get it cooked just right, the egg yolk will have a little bit of ooze on the inside. Just make sure to seal the sausage all the way around the egg before smoking. I like to serve these as an appetizer, but they are also fine as a nice smoked addition to a lunch salad.

I'll barbecue the hell out of a goat: get the whole animal on the grill or do up just the head or maybe the legs—whatever strikes my fancy. But the shoulder is probably my favorite cut to treat to hours and hours of gentle smoky caressing. This is party cooking, because (a) everyone will want some of this tender, spicy action and (b) though it takes a while to cook, you're only not sitting on your ass and drinking for, like, 10 minutes. The goat shoulder smokes for approximately seven hours. The smoking should be done in an indirect smoker (Texas-style chamber smoker). A temperature of 225°F to 250°F (a big variation, as smokers can be hard to control) should be maintained for 7 to 8 hours. The time variation is big, too, as there are so many smokers, and often backyard versions don't hold heat all that well. At a constant 250°F, it should not take longer than 7 hours, but an understanding of the variable types of equipment should be acknowledged. LISTEN
Idris Muhammad, Boogie to the Top—a fun, funky album. My favorite tune is "Bread" ("B-R-E-A-D, that's what I said!"). Dance with your goat! DRINK
Laphroaig, a couple rocks. Goat, chili, and smoky Scotch—there should be a song about this trio.

Three kindred spirits—pitmaster Robbie Richter, Jori, and I—came up with this profound merging of Southeast Asia and the American South. So profound that it could be both mascot and metaphor for Fatty 'Cue. LISTEN
Hours of southern soul while you drink southern beer and dream of southern girls—that is, if you don't have one of your own. DRINK
Lone Star. We're smoking brisket here, and that's Texas style.

This one honors our longtime barbecue buddy, the late Bob Carruthers, of New South Wales. We met Bob during his first trip to Lynchburg, Tennessee, to serve as an international judge at the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue. From then on he played a significant role in introducing Australian barbecue to Americans and American barbecue to Australians. His footprints on The Jack will endure, as will many good memories of the fun and enthusiasm he brought to the event. For this one we recommend Australian lamb ribs, and the whiskey has to be Jack Daniel's. Life is sweet. Life is sour. Life goes on.

Joellyn Sullivan is co-proprietor of the famous Silky O'Sullivan's on Beale Street in Memphis, where pizza, oysters, barbecue sandwiches, Cajun sandwiches, po' boys, barbecue ribs, and other foods are consumed indoors and outdoors to the tunes of guest musicians in a yearlong St. Patrick's Day scene. Her husband and co-proprietor, Silky, is an international barbecue rock star. They are longtime friends and Barbecue Royalty. Joellyn was kind enough to share this recipe with us, a variation on the recipe she gave to Chef Paul for leg of lamb at the World Cup Barbecue Championship years ago in Lisdoonvarna, Ireland, where she took home the blue ribbon for lamb in 1989.

One of our favorite images of the romanticized American West of the nineteenth century is a watercolor by Alfred Jacob Miller depicting six trappers gathered around an evening campfire. One is holding a skewered slab of bison hump ribs, smoking and grilling over the fire and smoke. Miller deemed bison hump ribs to be "that most glorious of all mountain morsels." Today the bison hump is sold as a boneless roast. Most vendors sell bison short ribs or back ribs, with no references to hump ribs. Channel your inner Old West trapper spirit anyway and prepare these back ribs with this easy basic recipe, which we believe would bring a delighted smile to Alfred Jacob Miller's face.

This simple recipe did not take the blue ribbon at any barbecue contest. It did come in third—by 2 points…in the Anything Butt Brisket category. In that category, you could barbecue anything but brisket and sirloin. Chef Paul chose to do beef short ribs, and almost everybody said he didn't have a chance of winning or even placing because he was going up against beef tenderloin, rib-eyes, T-bones, and porterhouse steaks. What did they know?!

A fatty, tough cut of meat, brisket becomes a thing of beauty through long, slow smoking, as in this recipe adapted from The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking & Entertaining by Cheryl and Bill Jamison. Brisket should shed a lot of weight during cooking, which can only be accomplished fully in a wood-burning pit or similar homemade smoker. The Jamisons’ cut of preference is a full packer-trimmed brisket, which is the full cut with a thick layer of fat on one side.

This was the first dish I learned to cook on the Big Green Egg, at the masterful hands of Ray Lampe, aka Dr. BBQ. This recipe yields a very succulent, lightly cooked, smoky fish. It calls for salmon, but any seasonal fish such as halibut or even trout can be substituted. I like to keep the seasoning to a minimum so the flavor of the fresh fish comes through. If you choose to add more herbs to your version, dried herbs work best. Adding fruit wood chips to the hot coals contributes another layer of flavor. I like apple wood best for maintaining a sweet flavor. Serve with lightly dressed baby greens.

This tasty roasted chicken recipe is from Cheryl and Bill Jamison and is adapted from their book, Smoke & Spice. We made this together at their home in Santa Fe and adapted it to the Big Green Egg, which works perfectly at 250 to 275°F. The birds were a beautiful tobacco color from the oak lump charcoal smoke. If you like, add any leftover rub to the mop for additional flavor.

Cooter, our chef in Rochester, concocted this tongue-tinglin’ booster sauce. Its flavor dances all around in your mouth with every tender bite of the sweetly smoked salmon.