TLTR – The grill master is not the easy, glamourous BBQ job that everyone thinks it is. If you are hosting a cookout, more work goes into it than you think. Before leaving, ALWAYS tell the cook you enjoyed the food, that makes the whole day worth it.
This is a post that will probably hit a very specific nerve with a lot of men between the ages of 28-55. A little back story, I am 30 years old, and began washing dishes at a local country club when I was 16. I had that job throughout high school and college to make some extra beer and gas money. One day, when I was 17, the line cook went on a coke fuel bender and never showed up for his shift. I was promoted from dishwasher to fryolator worker that day, and that is when I fell in love with cooking. I love to cook all types of food. Last year the wife and I moved into our home in the suburbs, and for my 30th birthday, she bought me a smoker. This summer, I have been obsessed with smoking meats, and have been working on perfecting the perfect brisket.
This weekend we decided to have a social distance cook out for a group of our close friends and family. The night before, I went to the butcher and picked up a 9lb pork shoulder, two racks of ribs, two full chickens, and one pescatarian guest requested a piece of salmon. I brought the meat home after picking out each specific cut, trimmed up the pork, seasoned it, wrapped it in butcher paper and put it in the fridge overnight. I cleaned the rest of the house, got my things set up for the morning, and went to bed around midnight.
My alarm went off at 6am on the day of the cookout. I jumped out of bed and went straight to the backyard. I fired up the smoker and let it climb to 225. In the meantime, I took the pork out of the fridge, and seasoned the ribs (one with a honey and applewood seasoning and one with a traditional bbq seasoning) and I also seasoned the chicken too. The pork went on the smoker at 6:45am. I let the bark build until about 9am. At 9am, I spritz the pork with an apple juice/water combo, and did so every 45 minutes for the next few hours until it reached an internal temp of 168. It hit this temp around 12, at which point I pulled the pork, spritz it, mopped it with a BBQ sauce, wrapped it in butcher paper, and put it back on the smoker.
At this time, the ribs went onto the smoker. I went with the 3, 2, 1 method, so I let the ribs cook for 3 hours, mopping them as needed. I then pulled them, and did a brown sugar/margarine base for the honey applewood ribs. And I did a BBQ sauce for the other rack. I wrapped them in butcher paper, and back on the smoker for 2 hours. After 2 hours, I pull them out of the butcher paper and back on the smoker for the last hour.
When I put the ribs on the smoker, I made my salmon marinade. I used a soy/honey/garlic/red pepper flake marinade. I poured it on and let the salmon sit for about 4 hours in the marinade. I also began soaking my cedar plank at this time. Around 2pm I put the chicken on a beer can and put it in the smoker, mopping it with BBQ sauce along the way. Around 330pm I put the cedar plank onto the smoker to warm up, and then cooked the salmon on it for about 90 minutes.
The pork was done at 4pm, and rested for 1.5 hrs in my yeti wrapped in towels. The ribs finished at 430 and rested for 30 min. The chicken finished around 430pm and the salmon finished right at 5. The cooking started at 6am, and everything finished right at the perfect dinner time that I aimed for.
While I was cooking the meat throughout the day, I also needed to get the yard ready for guests. I mowed and weed wacked my entire yard the morning of the cookout. I refilled all my tiki torches with citronella fluid, I cleaned all of our yard furniture, I filled the fire pit with wood and I did a mosquito fog around my wood line to try to help keep the bugs at bay. I am in the Northeast, and this Saturday was 92 degrees and straight sun. So, needless to say, I spent the day DRENCHED in sweat.
Everything was on pace and going great. Around 3pm, although already exhausted, I jumped in a quick shower. I freshened up as our guest started to arrive. I set up our lawn tent for shade, put the hors d’oeurves on some serving trays and set up an appetizer station.
Now, let me stress, up until this point I was good. What I love about cooking putting in all the hard work and having people enjoy it. It makes it worth it. And I know what I signed up for when I volunteered to host, and I know how much work smoking is if you want to do it the right way. At this time, all was good, and I cracked my first beer of the day.
Fast forward to 5pm, dinner time. Now I have been sweating, running around, already changed into my 2nd shirt, and only had 1 beer. My guests have been lounging, but have been drinking at a very furious rate. Now let me be clear, if I wasn’t the one in charge of the food, I would have been the one leading the pace. With that said, the difference is, I know how much work goes into cooking for a group, so I would never give the grill guy anything but complements.
This is when my day changed. Up until now, I was EXHAUSTED. I weighed myself the next morning, I lost 4lbs that day, I think mostly to sweat. But I was happy, ecstatic even bc the food had gone well, nothing burned, nothing stalled on me, everything came out the way I wanted it and one time. That quickly changed.
As I watched people begin to eat, it was like a knife being stabbed in my heart. Let me preface this by saying, the majority of these people said they did not like BBQ that much, but all wanted me to make it bc they still “liked it, it just isn’t their favorite thing”. None of the guest told me it was bad, and maybe this is me overreacting, but I could tell by people’s reactions, and their “tips for making it better next time” (which were things like there was to much bark on the pork or the smoke ring penetrated to far. Complaints that literally are the opposite of what you want with good bbq).
Now, if for some reason you are still reading this, you probably are wondering why I care. I know it tasted good. I know all the flavor I used. I know the cuts of meat I hand picked. I know the pellet combo I used to get the perfect smoke flavor. I know it came out phenomenal, so why let people who don’t really like BBQ get to you so much. For reference, I am your typical 30 year old, suburban American man. I like to smoke meats, woodwork, play sports, workout, the typical guy. I also hold myself to a certain standard. I want everything I do to be perfect, and I want to be the best. I also want to be a strong man for my wife and our child. I want to teach my son how to be a strong man, like men used to be, and not a soy boy cry baby.
BUT – after it was all said and done, and all the guests left the cookout. I cleaned the backyard, put the fire out, took out the trash, broke down the tables and chairs, did the dishes and cleaned my smoker. It was about 930pm, and dark out. I was caked in multiple layers of dried sweat, and I stood under a cold shower, exhausted.
And at this moment, it was the closest I had ever been to crying in as long as I could remember. I actually found a tear starting to form until I caught myself. It was a feeling I had never felt before.
For the first time in my 30years, I put so much effort into something. So much hard work. So much sweat. So much research and hope and optimism. All to see none of it be appreciated. People came, they drank, they had fun, they somewhat liked the food but had plenty of things to say about it, and then they left. None of them knowing how crushed I was at the end of the day.
With all this being said – I’ve come to two conclusions.
This is a post that will probably hit a very specific nerve with a lot of men between the ages of 28-55. A little back story, I am 30 years old, and began washing dishes at a local country club when I was 16. I had that job throughout high school and college to make some extra beer and gas money. One day, when I was 17, the line cook went on a coke fuel bender and never showed up for his shift. I was promoted from dishwasher to fryolator worker that day, and that is when I fell in love with cooking. I love to cook all types of food. Last year the wife and I moved into our home in the suburbs, and for my 30th birthday, she bought me a smoker. This summer, I have been obsessed with smoking meats, and have been working on perfecting the perfect brisket.
This weekend we decided to have a social distance cook out for a group of our close friends and family. The night before, I went to the butcher and picked up a 9lb pork shoulder, two racks of ribs, two full chickens, and one pescatarian guest requested a piece of salmon. I brought the meat home after picking out each specific cut, trimmed up the pork, seasoned it, wrapped it in butcher paper and put it in the fridge overnight. I cleaned the rest of the house, got my things set up for the morning, and went to bed around midnight.
My alarm went off at 6am on the day of the cookout. I jumped out of bed and went straight to the backyard. I fired up the smoker and let it climb to 225. In the meantime, I took the pork out of the fridge, and seasoned the ribs (one with a honey and applewood seasoning and one with a traditional bbq seasoning) and I also seasoned the chicken too. The pork went on the smoker at 6:45am. I let the bark build until about 9am. At 9am, I spritz the pork with an apple juice/water combo, and did so every 45 minutes for the next few hours until it reached an internal temp of 168. It hit this temp around 12, at which point I pulled the pork, spritz it, mopped it with a BBQ sauce, wrapped it in butcher paper, and put it back on the smoker.
At this time, the ribs went onto the smoker. I went with the 3, 2, 1 method, so I let the ribs cook for 3 hours, mopping them as needed. I then pulled them, and did a brown sugar/margarine base for the honey applewood ribs. And I did a BBQ sauce for the other rack. I wrapped them in butcher paper, and back on the smoker for 2 hours. After 2 hours, I pull them out of the butcher paper and back on the smoker for the last hour.
When I put the ribs on the smoker, I made my salmon marinade. I used a soy/honey/garlic/red pepper flake marinade. I poured it on and let the salmon sit for about 4 hours in the marinade. I also began soaking my cedar plank at this time. Around 2pm I put the chicken on a beer can and put it in the smoker, mopping it with BBQ sauce along the way. Around 330pm I put the cedar plank onto the smoker to warm up, and then cooked the salmon on it for about 90 minutes.
The pork was done at 4pm, and rested for 1.5 hrs in my yeti wrapped in towels. The ribs finished at 430 and rested for 30 min. The chicken finished around 430pm and the salmon finished right at 5. The cooking started at 6am, and everything finished right at the perfect dinner time that I aimed for.
While I was cooking the meat throughout the day, I also needed to get the yard ready for guests. I mowed and weed wacked my entire yard the morning of the cookout. I refilled all my tiki torches with citronella fluid, I cleaned all of our yard furniture, I filled the fire pit with wood and I did a mosquito fog around my wood line to try to help keep the bugs at bay. I am in the Northeast, and this Saturday was 92 degrees and straight sun. So, needless to say, I spent the day DRENCHED in sweat.
Everything was on pace and going great. Around 3pm, although already exhausted, I jumped in a quick shower. I freshened up as our guest started to arrive. I set up our lawn tent for shade, put the hors d’oeurves on some serving trays and set up an appetizer station.
Now, let me stress, up until this point I was good. What I love about cooking putting in all the hard work and having people enjoy it. It makes it worth it. And I know what I signed up for when I volunteered to host, and I know how much work smoking is if you want to do it the right way. At this time, all was good, and I cracked my first beer of the day.
Fast forward to 5pm, dinner time. Now I have been sweating, running around, already changed into my 2nd shirt, and only had 1 beer. My guests have been lounging, but have been drinking at a very furious rate. Now let me be clear, if I wasn’t the one in charge of the food, I would have been the one leading the pace. With that said, the difference is, I know how much work goes into cooking for a group, so I would never give the grill guy anything but complements.
This is when my day changed. Up until now, I was EXHAUSTED. I weighed myself the next morning, I lost 4lbs that day, I think mostly to sweat. But I was happy, ecstatic even bc the food had gone well, nothing burned, nothing stalled on me, everything came out the way I wanted it and one time. That quickly changed.
As I watched people begin to eat, it was like a knife being stabbed in my heart. Let me preface this by saying, the majority of these people said they did not like BBQ that much, but all wanted me to make it bc they still “liked it, it just isn’t their favorite thing”. None of the guest told me it was bad, and maybe this is me overreacting, but I could tell by people’s reactions, and their “tips for making it better next time” (which were things like there was to much bark on the pork or the smoke ring penetrated to far. Complaints that literally are the opposite of what you want with good bbq).
Now, if for some reason you are still reading this, you probably are wondering why I care. I know it tasted good. I know all the flavor I used. I know the cuts of meat I hand picked. I know the pellet combo I used to get the perfect smoke flavor. I know it came out phenomenal, so why let people who don’t really like BBQ get to you so much. For reference, I am your typical 30 year old, suburban American man. I like to smoke meats, woodwork, play sports, workout, the typical guy. I also hold myself to a certain standard. I want everything I do to be perfect, and I want to be the best. I also want to be a strong man for my wife and our child. I want to teach my son how to be a strong man, like men used to be, and not a soy boy cry baby.
BUT – after it was all said and done, and all the guests left the cookout. I cleaned the backyard, put the fire out, took out the trash, broke down the tables and chairs, did the dishes and cleaned my smoker. It was about 930pm, and dark out. I was caked in multiple layers of dried sweat, and I stood under a cold shower, exhausted.
And at this moment, it was the closest I had ever been to crying in as long as I could remember. I actually found a tear starting to form until I caught myself. It was a feeling I had never felt before.
For the first time in my 30years, I put so much effort into something. So much hard work. So much sweat. So much research and hope and optimism. All to see none of it be appreciated. People came, they drank, they had fun, they somewhat liked the food but had plenty of things to say about it, and then they left. None of them knowing how crushed I was at the end of the day.
With all this being said – I’ve come to two conclusions.
- I have a new born baby. I could not be more excited to be a dad. But I have this really troubling feeling that this is what the next 30 years of my life will be. Me, the man of the family, needing to be strong and hold things together for everyone, putting my all into things, just to have people not appreciate it. Maybe this is me looking back at all the times I took my parents for granite, and wondering if this is how my dad ever felt.
- This is an easier, more straightforward rule that I will always live my life by now. No matter what, anytime I go to someone’s house, as always, I will try to brings things and help clean up etc. But moving forward, I will NEVER leave without seeking out the person who cooked, shaking their hand, looking them dead in the eyes, and telling them how much I enjoyed their food, even if it sucked. If one person had done that to me, it would have made the whole day worth it.
Last edited by a moderator:
