This here is a Kamado Joe. We own one now, as you may have heard in passing on my recent podcast episode. It will smoke stuff but more interestingly for us it’s also excellent for slow-roasting large pieces of meat. Like brisket, which is something we’ve only just started to discover.

Brisket looks like this, when it’s covered in salt and pepper, which was our first plan: 

Apparently this is ‘classic Texas style’ and yes that is a LARGE piece of meat. After cooking for… maybe 7 hours, it looked like this on the outside:

and like this on the inside: 

It was far, far tastier than I had been expecting! J was a bit disappointed based on what he’d been reading that it wasn’t quite as soft as expected. We suspect part of this is about Australian meat being different from American meat, which I am COMPLETELY FINE WITH. We proceeded to eat it for several meals over the coming week, and it reheated very well indeed.

The next one we did, which was even bigger because that’s what the butcher had, was seasoned slightly differently. Less salt and pepper; more herbs such as thyme. I thought it tasted a bit better. It also cooked faster, which was a surprise… which may have had something to do with better control over the heat, perhaps something to do with less salt, or maybe just it was a different animal. Fortunately, it can rest for a couple of hours without losing anything. So that’s what it did.

I’m really enjoying this particular experiment. There’s going to be a lot more barbecues in my future.