This past summer turned out to be the best one of my life thus far- it was completely overflowing with family and friends, food, music, travel and love. I saw countless good bands play live, drove cross-country, spent one day in San Francisco and five days in Hawaii. Amazing food was prepared and shared. There were two weddings, numerous birthdays, and I made new friends all over the place. I also began making music in earnest, and started mentally and financially preparing to travel around the world again a few years from now.
During the last few weeks of summer, my friends Heather and Bill and I began planning the only suitable ending to such an amazing summer: hosting a gigantic food and friend focused southern picnic. The inspiration for it came in part by Heather’s idea to have a chicken fry, and things just spiraled completely out of control from there.
For me, the end of summer southern picnic was to be more than just a great way to say farewell to summer. It was also the culmination something that began a year and a half ago when I found myself back in Portland after fourteen months of traveling, recently divorced, and with no real social circle to speak of. Food and Friendships soon became the twin priorities of my new life, and though it took some real effort when I was starting out, I have learned how to make them both, and to make them both well.
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The Prep:
Not long after I slaughtered a rooster a few months ago, Heather floated the idea of having a foodie field trip to to the Blaine Broilers farm to see them in action. We would each buy a couple of birds, and then fry the all up the following afternoon. One thing or another prevented the field trip from happening, but the week before the southern picnic we got ten (ten!) of their birds to fry up, all of which just barely fit in my freezer.
At this point I still had no idea what I was going to make for the picnic. Then I remembered that a coworker had given me an electric smoker a few months ago and that it had been sitting outside since I brought it home. I’d never smoked meat before, why not give it a try? But what to smoke? This was my very first attempt, so why not start with one of the most challenging cuts of meat to smoke: a huge beef brisket? My internal debate about whether or not to smoke a brisket ended when I mentioned the idea to Heather and she said, “Oh, well I have an eight pound, grass fed, hormone-free brisket in my freezer, if you want it.” Amazing.
A brisket is essentially a connective tissue filled pad of chest muscle, and is extremely tough due to the fact that when the cow lays down it carries about 60% of its body weight in that area. By contrast, the muscle that filet mignon is cut from carries no weight at all, which is why it those are so tender from the start. But here’s the thing: cooked long enough at a low enough temperature, all of that collagen melts and leaves behind a huge slab of meat so tender that it can literally be cut with a fork. Actually making that happen was the challenge I set for myself.
On Wednesday afternoon while riding my bike across the Burnside bridge after a visit to a finish carpentry shop for scrap pieces of oak for the smoker, I had what could only be described as a vision: the picnic needed a mascot, something memorable, and one image in particular came to mind. I’ll get to what it was in a minute.
Prepping the brisket for the picnic on Saturday began that night. The meat needed to be thawed. This would take some time. I decided to unwrap the cut, place it in a garbage bag, and then submerge that in my sink while regularly changing the water to keep the thawing process going.
While the brisket thawed, I began to paint the vision I’d had earlier in the day. It went pretty well.
Saint Sanders, acrylic on canvas, Summer 2009.
I can’t explain why the image of Colonel Sanders as a religious icon popped into my head fully formed, but this turned out surprisingly close to what I envisioned. I hung Saint Sanders at the top of my stairs, and he served as a sentry, alerting me to people coming up the stairs by making them laugh every time they saw him.
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After a good amount of time in the sink the brisket had thawed enough to unfold, but it was still very solid in the center. I left it covered in my fridge overnight and all the next day.
On Thursday night it was time to dry rub the brisket. After laying it out on a large baking sheet I suddenly grew intimidated by the possibility of ruining such a large, beautiful, expensive cut of meat.
Hmm.
The dry rub that I used was a mixture of smoked paprika, cayenne, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, sugar, and black and white peppercorns. It tasted fantastic.
As I began to apply the dry rub the meat took on a velvety texture. I massaged the mixture deep into the fat and muscle before wrapping it back up and putting it back in my fridge for another 36 hours.
Oh yes.
On Friday night Bill and Heather came over to disassemble their birds. It was a lot of work and it may have left every surface of my kitchen coated in a think layer of Salmonella, but things turned out great in the end. Heather generously left one of the chickens whole for me to do what I wanted with.
Before going to bed, I set up the smoker in the back yard and left a bunch of oak chunks and hickory chips soaking in water in my bathtub. Then I set my alarm for 4 a.m. and went to sleep.
The Big Day:
4 a.m. came too soon. Around 4:30 I finally crawled out of bed, put some clothes on, and stumbled out the door. It was raining lightly, but the weather report said it would end in the early afternoon, before the picnic began. I hoped so.
After arranging the oak blocks close to the heating element and placing two aluminum bowls full of hickory chips on top, I assembled the rest of the smoker. Above the heating element sat a deep metal pan that I filled with apple cider and beer. The pan is important because it helps regulate the smoker temperature and keep the meat moist.
Next came the brisket. It looked amazing, and just barely fit on the upper grill of the smoker. The design of the smoker is such that the wood will get hot enough to smolder, but with no source of oxygen to burn, it can not catch fire.
In tests conducted earlier in the week, my smoker tended to reach 275 degrees and then stay there. 225 would have been ideal, but there was no way to adjust the temperature- if I cracked the lid slightly fresh air would get sucked in and light the wood on fire. I decided that the most important thing was to check the internal temperature of the brisket regularly and just hope for the best.
The reason that I started so rediculously early in the morning was that I’d been reading about how to smoke a brisket all week and the general consensus was that it needed about 1.5 hours per pound. Mine was just under 8 pounds, so I figured I would need about 12 hours on the smoker. 4:30 a.m. + 12 hours = 4:30 p.m. + resting time = 5:00 p.m., just in time for the picnic.
After laying a bunch of slab bacon over the brisket, I went back to bed for a few hours. Around 7:30 a.m., I came out to check on it. The internal temperature was already 180 degrees, which shocked me because I was planning to take it off once it reached 190. Even so, the brisket had shrunk dramatically, and things seemed to be going well.
And then… after I putting the top back on I tapped it a few times to make a tight seal with the base, which cause the pan filled with liquid to slip off its hooks and fall onto the wood and element. A massive plume of cider steam erupted from the top of the smoker, hissing the whole time. Within a minute, I had transferred the brisket to my grill, disassembled the smoker, refilled the pan, and reassembled the whole thing. Disaster had just barely been averted.
After conferring with the meat counter guy at my local grocery store I decided to take the brisket off the smoker after only 5 hours. It turns out that most of the smoke flavor that the meat will absorb happens in the first few hours, anyway, and it made more sense to keep it wrapped and warm in my oven for the rest of the day than risk drying it out. At 9:30 in the morning, 7 hours earlier than I expected, my brisket was pretty much done.
Heather and Bill arrived in the afternoon to begin the chicken fry. They had decided to fry some of the chickens in advance so that we’d have some to set out right away, but there was still a lot of work to be done.
Heather had bathed all of the chicken pieces overnight in buttermilk, and somehow procured several gallons of high quality, snow-white, mildly porky lard in which Bill fried them. Before frying the chicken in the bubbling lard, they first fried some slab pork in it for some additional flavor. Then they removed the pork, sliced it up, and set it out as hors d’oeuvres. They went very quickly.
The thing that I love about those two, the thing that makes us such good friends in food, is that they always take things much further than they need to. Because I am the same way, when we join forces it just gets rediculous.
While Bill and Heather toiled away in my smoky, greasy kitchen, I went outside to greet our first guests and prepare a large bowl of boozy southern punch.
5 p.m
Earlier in the day I had made a frozen fruit ring out of fresh fruit and juice, which went into the punch and kept it cold without watering it down.
The punch was made with 2 bottles of cava, pineapple juice, orange juice, 7-up, fresh fruit, and a healthy dose of bourbon whisky.
It was all I drank for most of the night.
Running back upstairs, I found that the first batch of chicken was ready to be set out.
A few days before the picnic I bought 60 ears of corn on Sauvie Island. The morning of the picnic I shucked and stacked them in my steamer, and then completely forgot about them until much later in the evening.
7 p.m.
By 7 a number of guests had arrived and they had all brought something to share. On the picnic invite we admonshed our guests to pull out all the culinary stops for this thing, and they did- there we an endless array of salads, sides, southern specialties, and drinks. Soon, two tables were completely packed with food, and the thing weren’t even in full swing yet.
My brisket turned out as perfect as I could have hoped. It was smoky, with a kick of heat from the dry rub, but tender and moist and delicious. Heather and Bill’s buttermilk fried chicken was the best I’ve ever had.
It would have been nice to sit down and mingle with guests then, but I still wasn’t done cooking. There was one more dish I wanted to make: an apple cinnamon and honey glazed roasted chicken, which I stuffed with fresh apples and an aluminum bag stuffed with hickory chips. That’s right- there was wood steaming and smoking inside the bird.
In addition to the massive amounts of fried chicken, Heather and Bill also contributed 120 (120!) fresh, delicious oysters. Most of them were eaten raw with a delicate mignonette, but some were grilled over mesquite.
That’s the apple cinnamon honey chicken roasting alongside the oysters.
Evening at the C.J. corral.
By 9 the party was going in earnest. I finally made a plate for myself and sat down to eat. I wanted to try a little bit of everything on it, but in order to do that I would have had to fill four plates. The food was amazing.
As countless different conversations swirled around us, Heather dutifully manned the oyster station, tutoring newbies on proper schucking technique and trying to keep anyone from stabbing themself in the hand. We didn’t have any major mishaps that night, and a lot of people had the first oyster of their lives at our picnic, which was cool.
It was interesting to me that a number of people who absolutely refused to try a raw oyster spent so much time near the oyster station. It was clear that they really wanted to try one but were too afraid to take the plunge. I ate about 9 of them myself.
The food just kept on coming. With each succesive wave of guest the table was stacked higher and higher with treats. Strawberry rhubarb pie, cornbread, bacon sliders, arroz con leche, pulled pork on bourbon butter toast… our friends understood exactly what we had been going for with this and they did not disappoint.
At 11 things were still going strong, as new guests kept arriving to replace the ones who were leaving.
11 p.m.
Around the time I realized that I was still almost completely sober, my friend Dan arrived with a bottle of sweet tea infused vodka. A dash of that in a glass of lemonade became my drink of choice for the rest of the evening.
Sometime after midnight I disassembled the smoker and dragged the bottom part of it into the center of my yard. Resting it on several bricks, we built an ad hoc firepit and gathered around for a couple more hours of conversation, music, and southern hospitality.
Shortly after 2:30 a.m., everyone called it a night. Everyone agreed that it had been a huge success, and one attendee even said it was the greatest potluck she’d ever been to, which meant a lot to me since she was an older woman and had presumably attended numerous potlucks over the course of her life.
The Morning After:
7 a.m.
Cleanup wasn’t as much of a hassle as I expected it would be. Marissa helped out cleaning up the backyard and Heather came by and washed dishes for a couple of hours.
I take a perverse pleasure in my kitchen being this messy.
What was left of the oysters and brisket
What was left of the booze. Note bottle opener with cork still in it.
While we cleaned, the three of us marveled at how well the picnic had gone. We traded our favorite anecdotes from the previous nice and then pulled out a paper and pen to tally how many people had actually showed up. After a lot of consideration, we put the grand total of guests at seventy six. Seventy six people who we’d fed and entertained and be fed and entertained by. Seventy six guests who we cared enough about to invite and who cared enough about us to come. Seventy six guests, most of whom arrived as strangers, and many of whom left as friends. Perfect.
Because we had left all the food outside when the epic picnic had finally ended, I suspect my compost pile was among the most delicious in the world that morning. While walking over to toss something in it, I came across an unshucked oyster in my yard and picked it up. A tiny striped slug was exploring its cratered surface with great interest.
The seventy seventh guest.
