Chapter 28 - Smokin’ Meat - Part 2
The rusty old drum heater that never got thrown out.
In order to smoke the beef ribs without his Weber, Smash decided he was going to ‘make do’. I liked the sound of this. With the exception of bathroom construction, making do is one of the fun things about being in the bush and living in a shed without mains power or plumbing, especially when it comes to cooking. There are no shops nearby, so if something is needed, we tend to see if we can ‘bodgey something up’, which is satisfying when it works and doesn’t really matter that much when it doesn’t because expectations aren’t that high to start with. Making do also brings back the sense of adventure I used to feel as a kid, camping out in the bush, sneaking matches, foil and a cup of flour from our Uncles’ pantry, mixing the flour with dam water, rolling it up in a foil and cooking the parcel over a small and fast burning fire which scorched the damper black on the outside, but left it pasty and raw on the inside. Disgusting, and inedible, but still fun.
All over our block, there are bits and pieces of rubbish left by the previous owners: the odd sheet of corrugated iron, wire, tins, bottles, and assorted chip packets. We’d searched a lot of the property when Schultzy disappeared, crawled into places we probably wouldn’t have ventured into without cause, like in the Leptospermum scrub behind the long drop where we’d found wire, tin sheeting and buckets where someone had been growing plants they didn’t want anyone else to find. Bit by bit we’d been clearing it out, stockpiling it ready to take to the tip. The one thing we hadn’t taken to the tip was a rusty old drum heater. Too rusty to be of use, we’d left it under a tree, hoping it would look quaint and blend into the landscape, and it had! So well we hadn’t seen it there, hiding in plain sight.
‘Yes!’ Smash cried, knocking out the rusted bottom with the heel of his boot. I voiced some concern about what might have been burned in it previously, but Smash assured me he would heat it up so that any chemical traces would be obliterated.
So, the barbecue was back on! I was keen on the idea of a party, but not so keen on the associated pressure of cooking something for the first time for a crowd, in a way we’d never tried before, using a rusty old drum (that by then I was convinced had been used as a meth lab, even though I have no idea how to make meth because I’ve never watched Breaking Bad.) What if the ribs were a disaster? Would Smash spend the entire evening lashing himself or the drum stove with a cat-o-nine-tails while we all sat around telling him the meat was ‘fine’?
Still, I figured we had heaps of vegetables to roast and make salads, and good old sausages in the esky should everything go pear shaped, so we got to work. Smash put the drum stove in one corner of the fire pit, made a grill out of wire to put inside, then started the fire and while waiting for coals to form, placed ironbark chips in a bucket of water to give them a good soak. I chopped up chunks of pumpkin, parsnip and potato and made a mixture of apple cider vinegar, brown sugar and olive oil to toss them in before roasting. I drizzled maple syrup over sweet potato slices, shredded cabbage and grated apple and carrot, ready for a coleslaw and toasted walnuts in a pan set near the fire.
Outside, the JBL blared The Pixies ‘Doolittle’ album out over the field. Smash moved coals around, played shovel guitar, wondered out loud how he would manage without his thermometer, then told himself he’d be fine. The idea that someone had smoked beef at some point in the past without a thermometer seemed to bring forth his never very far from the surface competitive spirit. If someone else had done it, he definitely could.
While waiting for the coals to be ready, he pulled the membrane off the underside of the beef ribs to allow the smoke to penetrate more effectively, then rubbed them all over with a dry spice made up of paprika, garlic, celery salt, cayenne, black pepper, and ancho chilli powder. Mid-afternoon, he placed the ribs on a cake rack inside the smoker, then tossed the water-logged iron bark chips beneath, onto the coals. They hissed, spat and almost immediately, thick smoke plumed straight up into the drum and out the chimney in a dense column, incredible really, how well that chimney drew.
‘Too much smoke?’ I wondered.
Smash shook his head. ‘It’s fine,’ he said, relaxed, self-assured. He leaned on his shovel and drifted off into Barbecue Dreamland. Gone was the furrowed forehead, the muttered expletives, the jerky movements that sent tongs clattering to the ground and kettle lids rolling away. No fancy gadgets, no Weber kettle, no digital thermometer, no chemical fire starters – just a rusty old drum, some ironbark, The Pixies and a making do state of mind.
I sat outside with him, shelling broad beans and peas for a salad. We talked about having Jerome and Marilyn come for a visit once Covid was no longer an issue, and what we would cook for them, and whether the drum stove would last that long, as wafer thin and rusty as it was. Smash said he could easily make another one, and there were other cooking methods he wanted to try, Brazilian asados, hungis, and some kind of device that could suspend pots on chains over the fire, with an angle bar mounted in a metal pipe so we could swing the pots in and out of the fire. There’d need to be a ratchet thingy, I said, to take the pots higher, lower. ‘Pfft. Easy, peasy,’ Smash said, without elaboration. We carried over the heavy cast iron plate that hadn’t been used since we demolished the leaning barbecue and put it in another corner of the fire pit, put the sweet potato slices on baking paper on top. In another corner I put a billy can of water to boil beetroots, and in the only corner left, the fire kept burning, creating more coals. By the time people started to arrive with their offerings, most of the cooking was done and all that was left to do was admire the glistening beef ribs every time Smash took them out to baste.
The ribs were perfect – smoky but not overpoweringly so, the knife went in between the bones easily, but there was still some integrity to the meat and it dripped with juices, and as for the bark – oh Lordy, like beef crackling – and the cause of some wrangling at the carving table. A big, delicious, stress-free success.
A friend asked me recently: ‘But what do you DO all day down there? in a way that made it clear it wasn’t her cup of tea and I’m the first to admit, it is hard to articulate our daily routine without making it sound quite dull. That day, making the smoker, cooking, hanging out listening to music and talking about creative projects we might one day get around to doing but probably not, is the kind of thing that leaves me feeling deeply gratified and content. Cooking that way is something we could never do in Brisbane. For a start, Brisbane’s heat and humidity would make it unbearable to spend that much time near the flames and having a fire that size to create coals in the inner-city suburbs is out of the question. There at the block, we had an unlimited source of dried timber, rocks to make a fire pit, music to play as loudly as we liked, the company of friends, trees, dogs, kangaroos and birds, and the realization that it wasn’t the quality of the smoker that counted, but the quality of life.
