Is it Art?

I am not an artist. I can not draw or paint. If someone held a gun to my head, put a pencil or paint brush in my hand and said make me a picture the blood spatter on the wall would be better than anything I could create with pencil and paper. I can not play a musical instrument. I tried back in grade school. I took up the saxophone with dreams of playing John Williams music stampeding through my young mind. I dropped it after a couple years of playing Mary Had a Little Lamb and Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. The most interesting thing we go to "play" was Ode to Joy and we were not very good at it. with both drawing, painting, and music I will have to be content just looking at or listening to those that have far greater skill than I have.




I have heard a description of art being something that is beautiful but has no real use or purpose. I can create items of leather, beads, and feathers they are beautiful I am not sure if they are art.




I think I created art yesterday. I used fire, heat, and smoke to turn three racks of pork ribs into what I will happily call art. Now just throwing some mammal flesh on a flame pit and putting some char on it is an easy thing to do. Hamburgers, brats and hot dogs are child's play. Steaks take a bit more skill but it is essentially the same thing. Getting the items finished correctly and to order is a nice trick. My wife is easy she likes her hot dogs and brats dead... DED dead, I call them 3 Mile Island or for those of you a bit younger Chernobyl dogs, no matter what you call them the end result is the same.




I have a confession to make here. The first time I tried to make ribs on a grill I totally fubared them. I was a total neanderthal and had not discovered the properties of indirect heat. The recipe said to grill them for 45 minutes and that is what I did. I came back to a slab of charcoal that disintegrated into a pile of charred bones when I touched it.... It was a fail of epic proportions. My wife still brings it up to this day in an effort to embarrass me but I find the whole thing universally funny.




I have learned a lot since that evening. I have created cedar plank salmon. for some reason I cooked it till the cedar plank caught fire and to my wonder the salmon was perfection. I have also made a couple Christmas roasts on the grill. But even after all that it was an LP or natural gas grill. Gas is easy. The heat is steady and reliable, real skill comes with using live fire.





Today I have a basic yet classic Weber charcoal kettle grill. No more electric start or knobs to turn for heat control. Now it is all amount of charcoal and airflow. Yet I can do more with that kettle grill than anything else I have ever done.




Yesterday Jonette made the rub, a mixture of sugar, salt and home made chili powder and liberally coated the racks and then it was all mine... my show, my creation. I put 33 charcoals in the chimney lighter and waited 15 minutes. I poured the lit coals over a bed of unlit ones on one side of the grill and a pan of water on the other. sprinkled on some wet cherry wood chips, put the racks on and slammed the lid down.




With the help of an electric probe thermometer stuck into the top air vent I now regulated the temp between 250 and 275 degrees for 45 minutes. The only way to do this is by carefully regulating the airflow from the bottom vents to the top. More air = more heat, It can take some time but once you get it all is good. After 45 minutes you pull the top off, turn the ribs over and switch their positions and mop with a mixture of apple cider vinegar and apple juice. Unfortunately the act of doing that allows a large influx of air to reach the coals and you have to start again with adjusting the airflow.




After another 45 minutes I cheat... true BBQ masters will snarl at me for this but I remove the ribs and put them in a 300 degree oven to finish off for another hour and a half. Yes that is cheating and I fully acknowledge that. A couple more mops with the cider and juice during their stay in the oven and....







Now the reason for the smoke, and using the grill in the first place, only become apparent when you cut into the ribs.

The pink area around the edges of the ribs is the holy grail of BBQ. The smoke ring, that is what makes all the work worth while.

I think it is art, it takes skill, patience, and time. The results are beautiful but temporary they do not last and as much as something might be to good to eat. You need to just eat it before the microbes get a hold of it. No use letting something so good go to waste. I ate my fill last night and will eat on the rest of them all week long.

Some still say that art can not have a purpose and if that is the case then what I created is not art in the classic sense but you can not debate it is good. Something that could turn just about any vegan into a T-rex at 20 paces is a great thing. I like my art to have a use. And like any art if you try and put sauce on my ribs I will knock you into next week. You do not take a sharpie and draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa, that just ain't right.