Black Tea Kombucha

Low & slow smoking 12 recipes

• The smoke coming off is thin and blue, not white and rolling. White smoke is unburnt fuel and it deposits soot and acrid phenols; a fire drawing enough air to burn its own smoke is what perfumes rather than tars.
• The chamber held its temperature within a narrow band for the whole cook, adjusted with the air intake rather than by adding fuel in armfuls. A pit swinging fifty degrees cooks the outside twice and the middle once.
• The stall was expected and waited out or wrapped through deliberately, not chased with heat. A brisket that sits at 70C (158F) for three hours is losing exactly as much water as it needs to; the cook who turns the fire up renders it dry.
• Doneness was judged by feel and by probe, never by the clock: the probe slides in with no resistance anywhere, and the number that matters is the one where the collagen has gone, not a time per kilo.
• It rested long and warm, an hour or more, wrapped and out of any draught. Cut straight off the pit and the juice runs onto the board instead of staying in the slice.

Where it goes wrong The fire was fed for temperature rather than for combustion, so it smouldered: white smoke, a bitter deposit on the surface, and a swing in the chamber every time more fuel went on. Then the stall was read as a stall in progress rather than evaporation doing its work, the heat went up, and the meat finished dry with a hard grey band under the bark.

Fermentation 53 recipes

• Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
• There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
• It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
• Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
• Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.

Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.