The Sacrificial Breast

I barbecued last weekend. I barbecued again tonight. mmmmm... BBQ.

There are a couple of unintuitive things about cooking meat that it took me a long time to learn. Not because they're big secrets, or hard to learn. I'm just a slow learner. :)

The first is that, after you take the meat off the grill, or out of the oven, it keeps cooking. Just because you took it away from the heat doesn't mean it's instantly room temperature. It keeps cooking. (Incidentally, the same is true when you burn yourself. Your first task should be to remove the heat source that's burning you. Your next task is to get some ice or cold water to pull the heat out of your skin so you stop cooking.)

So the first thing about cooking meat is that you remove it from the heat a little before it's done, because by the time it's cooled a bit, it will have cooked some more. The second thing that's counterintuitive is that you don't cut it or carve it right away. If you do, a lot of the juices run out and you get dry, tough meat. You need to let it "rest" before you carve it.

Tonight I BBQ'd some boneless, skinless chicken breasts. When they first went on the grill, the meat was bouncy. If I pressed it with a fork, it rebounded like slow jello. (That's a test for dehydration, by the way. If you poke your arm with a finger and the skin doesn't rebound, you may be dehydrated.) When the thinnest chicken breast stopped acting so jiggly, I cut it open to see if there was any pink inside. There wasn't, so I took it off the grill, and I took the bigger breasts off the grill too. By the time they made it to the plate, they were fully cooked.

I put the skinny breast on a plate to cool it off, and we nibbled at it while we waited for the others to be ready to serve. The one we nibbled was the sacrificial chicken. We cut it first to see when to take the bigger ones.

Before I put the meat on the grill, I put some water-soaked hickory chips in the barbecue. I cooked the meat slowly, and let the hickory chips smoke the meat. Now my fingers smell of sweet hickory smoke. It smells great. You could smoke a bath towel like that and it'd probably taste good.

There are three ways to make any food taste great. You can smoke it, you can deep-fry it, or you can put ketchup on it. If you did all three, your tongue would probably explode.

Some of my fondest memories of childhood are camping and eating barbecue. Whenever my hand gets near my nose tonight, the aroma pulls me back. Pain is nature's way of keeping me from nibbling on my own fingers. Maybe if I added ketchup...


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