By: Chile.Bear.de
I like to grill. I’ll man the BBQ for free. I’ll smoke whatever meat I can get my hands on. But it took several visits to different BBQ joints for my wife and me to realize that most places could have been better. Our tastes had improved. We hadn’t gotten better, per se. We started recognizing that most of this could have been better executed.
Take BBQ sauce, for example. Look at the ingredients list on the back. The first ingredient is often corn syrup. Behind it is a bunch of other stuff you don’t exactly want in your body, Dextrose, maltodextrin, and other big words that don’t compare to real food. This realization was enough for me to figure out my own sauce recipe, one that’s only four ingredients, and they are ingredients I can control the quality of.
The source of your meat is important, naturally. Higher quality meat will affect more than the flavor on your plate. It also affects the cook: how long and hot you can run the grill. This I learned the hard way with a feedlot brisket instead of proper, pasture-raised beef. There wasn’t enough fat to protect the meat, and it burned.
The quality of seasonings is essential. You need to know what you’re coating your food with. But it doesn’t have to be the most expensive brand. Some of my tastiest steaks were seasoned with the cheapest garlic salts.
For smoking meats, wood pairing is more important than people realize. I find that smoking beef over hickory is pure heresy. People swear by it, but it objectively tastes worse than using oak or mesquite instead.
“Hickory is what we’ve always done,” I’ve heard people say. They simply do not know any other way.
“Quality” isn’t just part of a job title. An instructor phrased the word as “having a taste for quality.” Understanding your sense of taste takes time and heartbreak. It takes getting to know under and over seasoning. It takes intentionally under and overcooking food. It takes knowing the lower and upper limits. It takes learning right and wrong methods. With these, we can properly hone in on quality.
It’s not good to taste something and immediately give it an 11 out of 10. That’s the phrase I use to describe something that’s THE BEST one’s ever had. It’s not a victory. It means the taster has yet to learn how good food can really get. So when someone tells me my food is just an eight or a six out of ten, I listen hard: I’m about to learn something new.
Quality is used to describe tools, watches, fine glassware, etc. Quality is not limited to physical objects, though. It affects what we consume: our digestion and what we see and hear. The movies and music we consume affect us too, ya know.
Quality is a state of mind, a habit that affects our very behavior. As we hone better quality within, so will we find and create better quality around us.
