Two questions come to mind in the middle of a Smokin’ Soul BBQ Weekender, held on the farm near Foulksmills, County Wexford.
Firstly, when did you last have so much fun whilst at the same time learning so much?
And secondly, why don’t Pat and Jim, the Smokin’ Soul head honchos, have their own television series?
Pat Conway and Jim O’Brien established Smokin’ Soul ten years ago. Both had worked abroad for a couple of decades, then returned to their family farms in County Wexford.
Their travels brought them up close to a simple fact about every cuisine on Planet Earth: all cooking is foundationally live fire cooking. Flame and smoke feed the world. “We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame,” writes the anthropologist Richard Wrangham.
They soaked all this up, then they came home.
For the last decade, they have been creating exotically eccentric grills and smokers for serious food people, whilst at the same time cooking for events and hosting weekend classes in the art of live fire at the big barn on the farm near Foulksmills.
A Smokin’ Soul weekender is steampunk cooking over live fire brought to life, conducted by two of the wittiest dudes in Ireland. Pat only has to make some well-informed point about live fire, or ingredients, or cooking times and temperatures, before Jim fires back some witty rejoinder. You could make a tv series with this pair without a script, such is their volubility and bonhommie, their spontaneity and sense of craic.
But behind the laughter, this pair have a universe of knowledge regarding live fire cooking, and it translates into a simple truth about a SS weekender: for two days, everyone eats the most insanely delicious food you can imagine.
Right from the opener of ten different styles of sausage, made by their butchering expert Martin Sikula, from Rathdrum’s The Craft Butcher, through to the finale of pulled pork collar and a final taste of beef rib, this is a meat fest of almost unimaginable creativity and variation.
Pat and Jim and their team introduce you to live fire truths you could never have imagined. Want to taste the best chicken wings you ever ate? Then cook the wings for 80 minutes, bringing the internal temperature up to 85ºC.
That sounds all wrong – too long in the cooking, too high in the temperature – but then you taste the wings that Pat has just tossed in the dressing and you taste the best chicken wings of your life.
This sort of confounding logic goes on for two days. Every truth you thought you knew from all the bbq books you own is set on its head.
Best striploin ever? Cook it caveman style, right on the whitened charcoal.
Jerk chicken with skin like parchment? 85 minutes, climbing to an internal temperature of 85ºC, and the moist meat falls off the bone while the skin is like the greatest Communion wafer ever created.
Best beef burger? Made with a mix of chuck, brisket and steak, with 20% fat, and only salt for seasoning.
Smoked turkey crown? Salt and pepper, 74ºC, melts in the mouth.
People, they even achieve what many of us have found, through long trial, error and repeated failure, to be impossible: they cook the perfect brisket.
Sometime ’round about noon on the Sunday, it begins to strike you that what Pat and Jim have achieved is some sort of live fire empowerment. You realise that despite the shelf of books you own on live fire, what the discipline really needs first and foremost is for you to trust your instinct.
Your fire won’t ever be the same as some pitmaster in Texas. Your fuel could be completely different. The wind may be blowing in a different direction from yesterday.
So what live fire needs is for you to cook by your senses. Sure, you need a temperature probe, a superb piece of meat, a good piece of kit and a sharp knife.
But after that, you need your senses above all. Pat and Jim open this door for you, whilst feeding you the most irresistible scallops, and Alabama Chicken, and venison haunch.
It’s liberation through deliciousness.
This summer’s Smokin’ Soul courses take place on 8th June and 16th July (1-dayers); 15th-16th June and 13th-14th July (weekenders). Act fast!